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Is spending money included?

“FAILURE is the condiment that gives success its flavour,” observed Truman Capote. It can also be something to celebrate in its own right, even in winning-obsessed America. Just think of the film industry's Golden Raspberries (Razzies) or the Darwin Awards, which honour the most ridiculous accidental deaths. Now would seem a good time for finance to fete its own flops, too. Enter Hedgeable.com, an investment start-up that has come up with a neat gimmick to draw attention to its launch: a nationwide contest to find the three investors whose portfolios lost the most value between October 2007, when stockmarkets began to tumble, and March 2009, when they hit bottom.

The financial world's equivalent of Paris Hilton—named as worst actress, worst supporting actress and half of the worst screen couple in this year's Razzies—will be revealed on October 7th. The consolation will be a holiday in Rome, “the last great empire to collapse under a mountain of debt, a devalued currency and out-of-control spending,” as Hedgeable's website has it, and an appearance on CNBC, a financial-news network. The prizes for second and third place are trips to Iceland, scene of a more recent collapse, and Las Vegas, America's foreclosure capital. “We're trying to make light of a bad situation, but we hope the winners find the travel educational,” says Michael Kane, Hedgeable's boss.

The firm expects the worst portfolios to be stuffed with bank shares and ultra-long exchange-traded funds (which fall by several points when the industry index falls by one) and to have fallen by as much as 95% over the period. It will check with entrants' brokers to make sure they have not artificially inflated their losses. Who knows what lengths the desperate will go to for a junket?

Though aimed at small fry, plenty of sophisticated investors would be in with a chance. It remains to be seen if the thought of a few days in Reykjavik is enough to tempt the partners of TPG, a private-equity firm that lost its shirt on Washington Mutual, a mortgage bank, or Joe Lewis, a British billionaire who put $1.2 billion into Bear Stearns at an average price of $107 per share just months before the investment bank was sold to JPMorgan Chase for less than a tenth of that.