It takes about two hours to get to Sweet Briar from my home in Richmond. When I finally arrived, I was treated to a beautiful tree-lined driveway leading to an impressive campus. You cannot help noticing the large pink flags that hang along the driveway featuring one-word inspirational messages. My favorite was the one that said, "Question."

The Naked Portfolio Manager is an iconoclastic book that questions conventional thinking and dogma on Wall Street. It's central thesis is that empirical rules are more valuable than the training or experience of traditional judgment-based managers when constructing a stock portfolio. The ladies of Sweet Briar are testing this thesis by using the book and other data to construct rules-based methods, or "Naked Strategies," for selecting portfolios. The ladies will be broken into teams of two and each team will have to come up with their own methods of selecting securities. Professor Scott will post these rules to the Internet and then track their performance versus that of some of the smartest minds on Wall Street during 2010.

In order to comply with the book, the ladies' rules will have to be:

1. Empiracally based
2. Clearly defined
3. Broadly diversified
4. Completely transparent

5. Relatively simple

"Naked Strategies" are by definition easy to implement. While constructing the rules may be complex, once the rules have been created, following them should require no specialized expertise. Because the rules are clearly defined, anyone following the rules will make the same choices as Professor Scott will when he implements the methods.

I'm really looking forward to the results of this experiment. I'm betting on the ladies of Sweet Briar to outperform Wall Street. To stay posted on the progress and results of this fascinating experiment, subscribe to my blog by entering your email adress in the box to the right.