It’s March Madness. It is also time for us to give away some goodies, i.e. recently published finance and investment books. We are therefore having another Abnormal Returns bracket contest! We will be giving away prizes to the top four finishers. This year’s winner will receive their choice of four (4!) books. The other Final Four finishers will also receive a book as well.

The rules this year are pretty simple:

  1. Head over to Yahoo Tournament Pick’em sign up for the ‘Abnormal Brackets’ pool and fill out your bracket before the games start on Thursday.
  2. To be eligible for the prizes you also have to be signed up for the Abnormal Returns newsletter list at Noon on Thursday, March 19th. (If you are not already a member you can sign-up here.)
  3. You must have a US-based postal address.

That’s it! One twist this year: in honor of all the technical analysts out there we are using Yahoo’s Fibonacci scoring system this year which modestly rewards early round scoring. Per Yahoo:

Fibonacci (2-3-5-8-13-21) – A nicely balanced scoring system based on a famous mathematical progression. Slightly favors getting earlier picks correct versus later picks.

Thanks for everyone who signs up. We will see if anyone can stop Kentucky, the biggest favorite in modern NCAA tournament history. It should be fun. Good luck!

Update:

Nate Silver provides his bracket odds.  (FiveThirtyEight)

The 60-second bracket builder.  (WSJ)

How to win your NCAA bracket.  (Slate)