Coin-flipping contest

Link: The Top Pickers vs. the Pack.

If you held a coin-flipping contest with thousands of people, and had them flip coins over and over again, eventually you'd find one or two folks who had a long string of heads. Then, if you were to ask them how they did it, they might even have cogent explanations on how or why they had become coin-flipping "experts." At the end of the day, their ability to flip coins would still be 50/50, like everyone else.

The funny thing is, the model for PicksPal and the companies discussed in that article come from simply SELLING the predictions. So like mutual fund companies that keep thousands of funds around just to publicize the occasional winners, their interests are not aligned with yours. They just want you to transact (and buy picks), not actually participate in the winnings themselves.

When you see these companies actually investing their own money into the results, then that'd be the first indicator that the company believed the results were any good.