Overall Trading Experience on the Virtual Stock Exchange Competition

Overall Trading Experience on the Virtual Stock Exchange Competition

It was a great experience taking this investment class along with the opportunity trading on the virtual stock platform. This gives us a chance of enhancing our knowledge we gained in class and applying it into practice. Honestly, I have been trading stocks in my personal account for over a year. Therefore, I have been pretty familiar with stock platform, and such as different types of orders. I was not very excited about this competition as I heard it at the beginning of the semester. However, I decided to become serious as I heard you that the winner of this game will not have to write this paper. As I mentioned earlier, I have been trading stocks but unfortunately with some losses. Thus, I decided to manage my portfolio carefully. My goal was to maximize profits with as few trades as possible. I mean I was trying to investing each of my dollars very carefully and wisely as I treat them as my own money. I felt that I would be able to gain the real experience this way. Ultimately, during the stock competition, I totally gained $22,119.53 in profit with only 21 trades (ends on 07/05). I pretty happy with it not only I showed that I made money, but also I took it seriously and carried out what I exactly planned at the start of the game. I will talk about my experiences and what I gained in detail in the following paragraphs.

Orders. I tried different types of orders as I bought and sold my stocks. I usually put a market order when I was trying to buy and sell my stock during the trading hours if I saw an opportunity. On the other hand, I would put a limit order when I saw an opportunity as I do my research and analysis at night. This way would allow me to acquire the stock I want to buy the next day without pay much premium. It actually worked out pretty well. I got all the stocks I wanted to acquire except Facebook. I put a limit order on Facebook about $25 dollars, but the order was never executed. In addition, I think I did not use stop order a lot. I would put a stop order as I short sell stock. My rationale behind it was that if the stock price I shorted indeed goes down, and I was trying to avoid missing the gains I made as price goes down because I would be in front of my computer all the time.

Trade. Because we only have 5 weeks, so I trading strategy was trading stock based on technical indicators, the one I always use is slow stochastic. I figure that there would be enough time for me to make huge profits by using buy-and-hold strategy. Therefore, all of my trades were pretty much based on slow stochastic indicator. Namely, I would consider purchasing a stock once it fell to the low area, and consider selling or short selling a stock once it reached in the high area. All the stocks I bought except one were all mid or high capitalization firms. I created a portfolio on Google finance and Yahoo finance, so