Unfortunately the top 2006 final rankings aren't readable (at least from my browser). And there were some distributions missing, so that year's rankings were partially incomplete, despite a herculean effort by Susan.  After some research, I concluded that the top places went to:

2006: Wheaton, MLDeerslayer, Paulob?... 118 contestants

2005: SageNolos, MLDeerslayer, dougmoore, kevindow, FredP... 100 contestants

2004: AKHalea, monkfish22, pointyhairedbos... 40 contestants

2003: dcapbtls, kevindow, danasu ...33 contestants

It might be worth noting, that the current leaders are also prominent in prior contests. But MLDeerslayer's all gold portfolio (same picks ea yr) took dead last in both 2003 & 2004!  Hopefully that won't the case in 2008 for some of the very aggressive (risky) portfolios  ;-)

The mutual fund contestants have generally been quite successful in outperforming the market.  Over the past 5 years, as a whole, 77% or about 3/4's of the contestants have managed to beat the returns of the Wilshire 5000, (and an even better showing against the S&P 500).  In 2005, 97 out of 101 contestants, or 96% exceeded the mkt!

Some people play the contest simply to prove they can do better than the standard index fund.  Some limit themselves to a select group, like Rashid's Funds of Funds, or Petro's strictly Vanguard funds, or a combination of index funds &/or ETFs to beat the index standard.

The following table shows the percentage of contestants that exceeded the return of the VTSMX Vanguard Total Stock Market Index fund for each respective year.

Note: 2007 figures are as of 11/30/07

Are other people using special strategies that I am missing/unaware of?

For example; I seem to remember someone using only DFA funds?