I am definitely not one to invest into stocks.  In fact, my first two attempts at jumping on penny stocks turned out horribly. One buy came off the back of a friends University Research Project, and was de-listed in months, and the other wasn’t much better.

I came across this article today on bloggingstocks.com “Top Picks 2011: Favorite Stocks from 60+ Advisors” and found a few interesting cheaper stocks I might actually want to play around with in the coming year. It does contain the usual suspects like Google (over $600 per share), and Apple Inc. (over $300 per share), but it also contains a few interesting nuggets, such as Aastrom Biosciences, Inc. (ASTM, $2.64), Timberline Resources Corp. (TLR, $1.01), and Kaminak Gold Corporation (KAM, $2.80) to name a few.

I thought it would be interesting to setup a fake portfolio on google finance, spend $1,000 per stock in fake money today, and watch and see how the portfolio performs. It took some time to set this up, so if any of you want to download the google finance OFX file, you can download it from me, here. You may have to right-click the link and “save file as”, or “save target as”, in order to download it.