Well, it seems like we’re actually learning something!
In case you missed them, let me tell you about the Teeming Millionaires Stock Market Challenges. We’ve had three so far.
We’ve been through a bunch of stock market websites, we’ve hammered out rules and we’ve seperated the financial whizkids from the rest of us. pantom won the first round, Bibliophage took the crown in an ugly second round and Paul the Younger just finished making most of us look bad in the third round.
Round IV will begin soon… Here is the info you need:
[ul]
[li]The games are played at http://www.MarketPlayer.com. The Competition ID for Round IV is SDMB-IV and it is case-sensitive.[/li][li]The competition runs for one (1) month, from Thursday, April 26, 2001 until Friday, May 25, 2001.[/li][li]Before you play, you will need to register with MarketPlayer. Once that is done, you create a portfolio and enter it into the competition.[/li][/ul]
IMPORTANT
You must register for the competition before it begins. Once the game starts, it is closed to new participants. You must join by Thursday, April 26, 2001 to participate.
To get anyone else to play, we need to bump this thing.
What do you people need?
It’s easy, it’s fun, and you can learn things you didn’t know about the stock market before playing this game. I don’t know about you, but that’s all the reason I need.
If everyone else wants to be putz’s and chickenshit’s, well… then that’s their perogitive.
Just filler until someone better at descriptive detail comes along…<ahem>…I believe Paul is the designated tour guide (it’s part of his duties.)
Anyhow, what this is is a simulated bout of day trading. We all start off at the same time with the same capital, usually $100,000 (US), and make a go for as much as we can over a specified time period, be it one month or whenever.
You can buy, sell, short and/or cover whatever you want, but be advised that most games limit you to 20-minute market lag, so don’t expect real-time performance. The only limit to the numer of trades you make is the number of trades you make, so go nuts [sub]For a case study, see CNoteChris[/sub] but rememeber that, much like real life, each trade incurs a cost, but it’s a measily $8 or so, so feel free to ignore it until you hit 500 or more trades.
Think of it as a risk-free trip into the world of high-stress, white-knuckle stock/bond/mutuals trading.
Its all fake money based on the real stock market valuations as you trade (w/ some short delays). You get access to as much information as you want. Pretty much you “buy” whichever stocks you want based on whatever you feel. You can guess or do research. It doesn’t really matter seeing as how crazy the market has been recently.
A little knowledge about the stock market goes a long way but they have a lot of info on the site itself. I picked it up pretty easy and I’ve never day traded in my life. Also, you dont even have to actively trade to make trades since you can set up limit orders.
If you tried in the middle of the night, it may have been updating it’s numbers for the day (they have many, many competitions running at once.) Try again today and let us know if it’s still not working.
As SouprChckn said, there is a lot of info on the site, as well as hundreds of other good sites on the net for stock and market info. Two of my usual stops are Yahoo!Finance and CBSMarketwatch. At Yahoo you can get Real-time ECN Quotes for many stocks, and take a bit of the guesswork out of the twenty minute delay, tho not the delay itself (it takes about 20 - 25 minuted for a trade to go through.)
I like to think of myself more as a “carnival barker”
Seriously…I don’t think those of us who have played already have any problem answering questions as the game progresses…c’mon, you’ve got nothing to lose!
Thanks for the compliment, pantom, and welcome back.
As for the rest of you… thanks for filling in with information while I was gone. You see, from time to time, I actually have to work. :o
Anyway, you have all explained most of the questions people have asked pretty well, so I am not going to do much except make two points:
[li]The gist of the game is this: Imagine that you had $100,000 that you didn’t mind losing. What might you do with it in the stock market? That’s it… just try to get rich. :)[/li][li]Most of the answers people gave so far mention “day trading.” I just want to point out the (hopefully) self-evident fact that day-trading per se is not required. You can make one trade during the contest or one million… or anything in between. As a matter of fact, my personal bias goes against day-trading. Of course, it’s hard to win a month-long contest by buying and waiting, but good what is good strategy in life is not always good in a game.[/li]
Welcome, new folks! Come one, come all!
REMEMBER: You must join by Thursday, April 26, 2001 to participate.
I’m having a problem trading. The same, “Above Max Trade Percentage” message that came up before is happening again.
DON’T PANIC new players- It’s an easy problem to fix, but I don’t have the privileges to get in and do it myself. When SD sees this, he’ll make the change.
Good Luck!