Week Four: Paper Trading

The Lesson: The Stock Market
At the beginning of the day, the students were given and taught this handout on What is the Stock Market.pdf

We talked for a bit about why companies issue stock, and a bit about why people are interested in buying them. We then went on about financing, and talked about the sub prime crisis, and how irresponsible lending lead to such a catastrophe.

We then watched the following video about the Sub Prime Crisis. Very funny, yet very true:

Find more videos like this on Jiahua

The Task: Paper Trading. This week no teams. Rachel was absent, so we only have 4 competitors competing on their own: Xiao Mei, Linda Shan, Joyce Hu, and Sophie Cao.

Paper Trading is the act of buying and selling stock with fictitious money. There are a million websites where you can practice buying and selling stock in real time, without the risk of really losing your money. The website we are working from is smartstocks.com. Here, the contestants will practice Day Trading. Day Trading refers to the practice of buying and selling stock within the same trading day. Traders that participate in day trading are called active traders or day traders.

Using this website, each contestant now has $1,000,000 fictitious dollars. From when markets open on Monday September 13th(9:00am EST), till their closing on Friday September 17th(5:00pm EST) They can use these dollars to buy and sell stock in real time as a day trader. At the end of the week, the contestant who has the least amount of money in their portfolio will be kicked out of the contest. Whoever has the most, will receive 300JHD.

One the website Each contestant will have a portfolio that will look like this one:

All they have to do is type in the Ticker number, the number of shares they want to deal, click "buy" or "sell" boom! The transaction is done in real time. The website updates every thirty seconds, so you can buy stock one minute, and sell it the next. Here is and example of how trades are tracked:

Here you can see all the buying and selling I did. The exact date and time, the ticker, the quantity, the price, and the totals. As you can see, I made almost $7000 in about an hours time. I got lucky. The contestants will need some luck as well, but they should be able to use their own knowledge to rightly choose which stocks will be worth buying and which ones are not. Good Luck!!

Results:
At the end of each trading day, I will publish the days results here:
Monday Close - Sept 13th, 2010
Tuesday Close - Sept 14th, 2010
Wednesday Close - Sept 15th, 2010
Thursday Close - Sept 16th, 2010
Friday Close - Sept 17th, 2010

Click here to go back to the Business Contest

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Comment by Sophie Cao on September 14, 2010 at 10:26pm: Oh ,No ,where did my money gone ? It's really like a gambling.

Comment by Eric Velouria on September 14, 2010 at 10:03am: I was thinking the same thing. I need to discuss with you 5 about what would be best. What about the daytime of the 23rd or 24th?

Comment by Rachel on September 14, 2010 at 9:58am: we have to work this sunday--0919.please change the contest to another day.

Comment by Eric Velouria on September 13, 2010 at 9:49pm: Linda and Xiao Mei both made over $10,000 on Monday's open! Great job!!

Comment by Eric Velouria on September 13, 2010 at 3:46pm: Well this contest is about learning new things - so it should be a good opportunity! New York time (EST) is 12 hours later than China time: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/

Comment by linda shan on September 13, 2010 at 3:33pm: difficult choice in buying the stocks. for the time being, i still do not have any idea:(

Comment by Joyce on September 13, 2010 at 3:03pm: hehe, i totally have no idea about Finance...i just use all my money & choose the company which i familiar with...btw, where could you know the Market opens time?

Comment by Eric Velouria on September 13, 2010 at 12:29pm: Looks like Xiao Mei is the only one ready. She has a nice Portfolio. Sophie only has a few shares bought. The Market opens in about 8 hours and 30 minutes! Good luck!!

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