f13.net

I've decided lately I want to get my investing chops up so I can effectively invest a nonminal amount of cash next year.  Searching for a replacement to the Yahoo Investment Challenge (Why'd they cancel it????) yields Investopedia.com, and I noticed you can start private games by invite only.

So who wants to start a fantasy stock market challenge game?  I'm putting this in here for now so people actually see it, because only crazy people actually go in that Fantasy Sports sub-forum.

That sounds like fun.

I'd be interested.  Sounds like a great new way to embarrass myself.

I'm in.

I'd just put all my money into beer stocks.

Or my stocks into beer money, I forget which.

Five people including me!  That's 4 more than I expected!  Exclamation mark!

Password is 'f13stocks', name of the game is 'F13s Stock Trading Madness', site is http://simulator.investopedia.com (http://simulator.investopedia.com).  I am a total amateur when it comes to this so I expect to get schooled, any lurkers or anyone else feel free to join!

EDIT: Read Viin's post below

Can you give us the game ID? The name doesn't work when trying to join.

That website sucks. We should try VSE instead. I made a game if you guys want to check it out, but either way this would be fun if we did it for a short time span (like 1 or 2 months) per game.

http://vse.marketwatch.com/Game/StartViewGame.aspx?id=F13_Stocks

Same pass as above.

Does this not allow us to buy mutual funds? I can't seem to find out how to do that.

Awesome!  I knew that first google result shouldn't be trusted!


We're not playing for forever here, I think Viin setup the time for 2 months or so right?

Yep, starts Nov 5th (Monday) and ends the 31st of December. You have the weekend to figure out what to buy on Monday morning. :)

The games are setup for short buy/sell cycles, as though you were day trading. Mutual funds are really only used for 401ks and ppl who don't want to look at any stock stuff except once or twice a year.

In. I did the stock trading thing in high school and won $40 :P

Woo. Unfortunately the next year I lost like $30k or someodd from $100k.

Bring it.  /files_nails

It sounds interesting but it's so completely against my own investing style I know I shouldn't even try.  That plus the research is an MMO-catassfest in and of itself.  :awesome_for_real:

Prepare for hostile takeover!

Don't forget to submit your orders this morning!

I don't have a goddamned clue what I am doing, but I bought me some stocks!  :oh_i_see:

Neither does anyone else. Your guesses are as good as mine.  :-P

Though I am curious why some folks picked the stock they did ..

cmlancas, why Daktronics Inc? (DAKT (http://www.marketwatch.com/quotes/dakt)) Seems to be doing real good today, just wondering where it came from.

I've followed DAKT for a long time. Possibly five years-ish? 27.x a share is pretty darn low for their shares -- I own a little of their stock irl as well.

Who knows if they will rebound or not. I know I shorted some Citigroup though! :D

What the hell? I bought Citigroup short and it shows me as long!

Fuck.

I'm in.

And first place at the moment!

If only I could be that financially reckless irl.

OK, wtf is the difference between short and long? I R consfuzed.

Also, nice rally at the buzzer kept me ALMOST even.

Short selling example from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)):

Short sell is betting that the stock price will go down. Your borrowing the brokers stock with a promice to buy at some point in the future. The more the price of the stock falls the more profit. If the stock price rises you have to buy at market.

Long is the normal buy and hold. Betting that the price rises.

I joined up and tried to short Citi as well.  Submitted at 0800 and the transaction was still pending at 1000.  I wanted out at 0915 when the market started recovering.   :|


edit

Just checked and it's still pending...

I just joined up. I have no idea what to do. I assume I can only buy something when the exchange opens, and can't have some runner put in a proxy order for me when the bell rings?

You can submit your order and it'll wait until tomorrow morning to start and fill them. I had maybe 3 orders ready to go Sunday night for monday.

Okay, I figured out the interface and put in some buy orders that I found amusing.

Shame F13 doesn't have stock.  Schild, are you reading this?

No, I was telling a nun I can't get into her account. She needs to learn how to keep track of her credit cards.

I'm going with the 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' strategery. I have no clue what any of the terminology means.

cmlancas is kicking ass today.

Activision and Sony are tanking my picks.

KBR is slightly making me a little, but it's giving me palpitations because it dips down so much while climbing.

This is actually turning out to be interesting and informative. My father has been dabbling in day trading so it will be something to talk about with him now and again, previously I'd always get lost when he started yammering on about trades.

Just be lucky that it didn't show me as short for Citigroup. I'd have a 7% return right now already. Fuckers.   :oh_i_see:

I totally stole your idea once Viin explained shorting. I'm not the only one shorting C either ;) I decided to try shorting Mattel, which was working great this morning, but it's rallying this afternoon. Mattel investors hate children! Unless it's the chinese lead paint industry driving it up...

Well apparently I don't know how to work the limit and stop orders any more. I thought I was putting in a target price for a sell but it just executed the trade at market value.

Ahh well, gave me a chance to implement my new strategy of buying a shit load of liquor.

Sky, if you have time to catass it up a bit at work, the best time to short is when the market opens really high (in fake stock market games) with a company that just had some bad news. For example, Citi opened really high today for the losses it posted yesterday. If you shorted at open, and covered toward the middle of the day, you'd have made $1 per share you owned.


However, some general tips I would give you for a short-term stock market games:

1) Blue-Chips are a bad idea. Generally, with a limit of $200,000, one can only purchase a fraction of the shares of a blue chip that one can purchase of a tech/med stock. For example: I can purchase six shares of THC (A medicinal company that posted a great gain today) for every one share of Dell. In the case of Google, I can purchase thirty-five shares of THC for one share of Google. Note that since we are day trading, for every equal cent that THC makes compared to Google, I am making thirty-five times as much money as you with the same money invested.

2) Penny stocks can bring big returns in the short run. This is pretty much the corollary that applies to the above statement. If I can get .10 on 50,000 shares at .50/share, it's worth a $5.00 gain on 1,000 shares at $100.00/share.

3) Short selling and then buying to cover is a great way to make big swings if you can CTV. Catassing to victory is definitely a key sometimes in the stock market gains. If you can find a good stock to short -- for example, if you were savvy enough to short JAVA (Sun Microsystems) today, you could have made big, big bucks. Short it on the decline, buy to cover, sell when it rebounds.

4) Most stocks generally resemble a sin/cos(x) graph. They all fluctuate. Take some big risks, and if they don't pay off immediately, just wait. For example, since I fucked up my Citigroup trade, I'm actually not looking so badly because I have held onto my stock. Granted, it would've been MUCH nicer to not get smoked for a $1,000 loss on day one, but the market usually rebounds. Except that one time, my sophomore year of high school, after 9/11.... Man, my stock market game sucked that year. (-35% over the entire game).


Note: Some of the math might be off, I'm too lazy to fix my posts.

I tried to make it back to dump my shorts (that sounds nasty) but I got caught up in a meeting and ended up losing a little bit on them. S'okay, I'm not playing to win, I'm playing to learn. :)

Lawls, you and I are betting on making money this holiday season while the rest of these fuckers are daytrading so hard they've got second mortgages on their houses to fund their habits.

We will lose, but at least we can see what they did.

I have quickly come to realize that I'm WAY too much of a chicken-shit to ever be a day trader with real money.  I actually feel more "in control" playing poker or blackjack in Vegas than I do with stocks.  Still... it is entertaining.  I'm going to bust the chops of a coupel of guys in the business school to see if they have some good tips. 

You are correct, sir!  I also picked up some Hasbro for good measure.

GH3 has sold like hotcakes and I'm hoping to ride the coattails of that good news.

Not to mention CoD4.


I snickered.

I snickered too at first when I purchased it, but damn, not even I guessed that it would be so  :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real:

Apologies for responding to my own post, but watch out for JAVA -- a 10% loss on a positive earnings report seems to me that this stock will see a tremendous upswing in the following weeks.


You heard it here first!  8-)

Edit: LULZ @ DONKEY KONG! (http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/nintendo-chief-says-sony-microsoft/story.aspx?guid=%7B07619813%2D82FF%2D4FD8%2D89CD%2D7C4C09593385%7D&dist=morenews_ts)

Read that article. What the hell does loyalty from EA, Activision, UBISoft, and Take-Two mean? They make their shit for every platform. This is why real news outlets doing gaming journalism FAIL also.

Yes, developing software for leading-edge hardware is more difficult than rehashing software for yesterday's hardware.

By this man's logic, we should be perfecting the VHS tape and optimizing Windows 95.

Ya know, because new stuff is hard.

Don't check your game this morning unless you are shorting stuff. It's a nightmare.


 :uhrr:

The U.S. dollar is falling so fast right now that if I had invested in American securities six weeks ago I'd be down 10% just from the exchange rate.  Oil is about to hit $100, not so much because the price has actually increased but because the dollar is down.  Crazy.

I'm worried something terrible is going to happen.

I invested in oil, coal, and specialty chemicals this morning.  I figured that would be my best chance against the falling dollar.  I'm noticing that I was wrong.

Is it good for investores of Oil if it tops 100 dollars a barrell?  Doesn't that mean there will be less Oil output, but then again I guess again demand would increase which would be good for Oil.

There are many types of Oil industries.  Some include exploration and new findings.  I think those areas may get stronger as the price of oil increases.  Also, domestic oil producers as well as those in china could see an upswing in value as the middle east quagmire becomes messier.  I'm talking out my ass here, but looking at the trends there are quite a few oil producers/pipeline companies/prospectors that saw huge gains immediately after the $100 barrel announcement.

I think, and this is someone who really has no sources to back up his argument, that too many factors are influencing the American economy right now. For example, the mortgage securities going belly-up, sluggish big blue-chip (most notably GMAC today) stocks, the Fed not figuring out what the hell it wants to do....the list goes on.

Are you suggesting that the American economy is so complex that even Nobel Laureates are struggling to accurately predict the future?  Naw...  :grin:

I think I'm trying to say (and yes, I get your green) that there are more factors than normal. For example, credit industries have (compared to now!) been relatively stable.

Yowza. Hey, how do I sell shorts anyway? I wish the help were a little better; just explaining all the terms in the drop-down menus would be a good start. I'd have sold my shorts earlier this am but I don't know how and I've already lost about $500 on them as they rebound slightly :(

I have a hard time with the concept of selling short.  It just seems wrong to bet on a loser.  Well, I guess it's ok if you profit on it.

Now I keep getting errors when trying to Buy to Cover my shorts (finally found the right help page). Arg!  :uhrr:

Seems buggy today, getting lots of transaction errors, had none yesterday.

The thing to remember about short sales is the amount that you could lose. If you buy long, and the stock tanks to 0 value. You could lose your investment. But that is all you could lose. On a short sale you will buy at market on the agreed on date no matter what the price. The amount you could lose is infinite.

I already forgot my password for it and their password request form errors. Fuck.  :uhrr:



Edit: Fixed. 261 shares into GOOG. I wanted to buy last Sunday which would have given me 281 shares at 710 but it wouldn't let me place a buy yet :?.

All but one of my ten stocks has now taken a turn to the red.

Stop selling, you bastards!!

It's not real money :) I stashed five or six hundred bucks in the bank on a quick short of Mattel. I would've made a grand or more if I had been able to time it correctly. I'm still holding Citi, hoping their troubles aren't over yet.

Missed Take-Two, that would've been a nice short if I could've got it before the GTA slip made the financial news rounds, I think it's off 72¢ today alone.

I'll take this moment to enjoy being at #2 with both columns in the green! :) I imagine I'll be trounced shortly enough....

What's the password on this?

f13stocks

It's on the first page.

Ookii, I normally don't read strikethrough.

Never too late to start!

Crikey.

Gratz Sky on being the only one who survived today's plunge.

Is there a virtual 40th floor window sill to jump from on the VSE?

It won't be so bad come next week, I think. The big banks will rebound sometime, just hopefully within our two months :)

This sort of shit is why I had to take Money & Banking twice in college!

What the hell happened to GOOG?  Bah.

It'll be back .. I hope.

Holy crap, I'm in #1? Total newb luck.

Need to dump KBR. I've made some brief gains with them, but they have been way too volatile. One good rally and they're history.

Google should bounce back, even though it might be overvalued because of all the cash outflow and long upward trend. I was considering it, but it's way too expensive per share for the way I've set up my portfolio.

I'm trying to short GM, let's see how it goes.

It's also fun to see what people are saying about stocks when searching for them at finance.google.com (they have the best interface by far), apparently GOOG is having a late market correction and only pussies are selling their stock, because it's going to go back up (apparently everyone who comments in bullish and flames the bears).

Why would any Google fan-bois sell GOOG? To buy APPL? Maybe.

I really hate the charts on MarketWatch, so I'll try Google's - I like Yahoo's beta Flash-based ones the best so far.

There's one thing I love about playing this with you guys: Everytime I think that I have a great idea, reality smacks me upside the head.  All the research in the world can't prepare me for the tension caused by daily fluctuations.  It's teaching me what I've suspected in the past; that I'm definately a long-term investor. 

Good thing this is fake or I'd be getting a margin call on GOOG. I put $100k and $100k margin in it.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm trying my best to diversify my buys just so I don't end up taking one big loss.  With the current market swing it doesn't seem to matter much... now I'm taking 3 small losses instead of a single (equal sized) one.

You can always hide in BRKB or BRKA.

Today's Market Watch headline:

Looks like I picked a really bad day to buy Yahoo long.  They were at a 5 day low and I thought this was the time to pounce.  HAH!

It is also pure awesomeness that someone who has yet to make a trade is sitting in second place. :awesome_for_real:

I thought about doing that as well, just to see if I'd win by keeping the $100k you start with. :P

The only way to win is not to play.

/wargames

GODDAMN GM STOCK IS RALLYING.

I can never win!

And google dropped to 690!  I bought it at like 740!

Ah the dicussion page for GOOG on finance.google.com is awesome right now.  Some people are posting saying bad things about the stock and convincing people to sell, others are people complaining about those posts saying their manipulating the stock price, others are links to the SEC complaints to report those people and their blogs, and others are people saying they're going to buy a million more shares because it's at a sales price right now.

I'm inclined to believe that it will go up because it seemingly went down for no reason, but If I have no clue why it went down I also have even less of a clue why it would go up, unless it's because it shouldn't have gone down in the first place.

Ah, shit. I was in a meeting that went long and I couldn't dump my shorts before the bell and most of them rallied like fucking made and cut my profits in half in less than an hour. Bah. I was at 5% almost all afternoon, knew I shoulda dumped before I went into that meeting. Bah.

I missed my big spikes as well... I knew I should have cancelled lectures today!

This thread has a disturbing lack of Eddie Murphy & Dan Ackroyd.

According to Google Priceline.com's revenue for 2006 was 1.2 BILLION DOLLARS.  Who uses priceline? I really don't get this.

Goddamn that stock is climbing after they announced the doubled their profit for 3Q.

What you need are pictures of a young Jamie Lee Curtis.

BEEF JERKY TIME!

I will now confess that I don't understand the stock market at all.  Merck just loses a huge court case having to pay out tons of cash in vioxx settlements and guess what... their stocks go up. 

Someone get me a dartboard.

A well placed war will save me. :)

Word, I've got a bunch of Haliburton and Lockheed that's just itching to invade Iran!

Why is cmlancas showing a $50k loss on Sun stock?


I'm confused.

OK GET READY FOR THE ANSWER:


Now what does this mean?  All I know is JAVA is no more and the stock ticker is now JAVAD.

EDIT: And this is why you don't sink half of your 100,000 into one stock.

 :oh_i_see:

Oh, now you tell me.

Right now, Morat20 and Croaker69 lead the pack and they haven't invested in anything.

Whose idea was it to play virtual stock market the week that the market crashed?

And right now I'm in 2nd place BECAUSE I invested half my money into one stock in preparation for huge Black Friday profits.  Also, you can invest more than $100,000.  You have something like an an extra $100,000 in equity, or some sort of credit.

Yeah. It's called margin. You pay interest on the 'margin' money you borrow. I don't know if this game has it but you have to have X% of real money to back up the margin with. Once you drop below the X% threshold you get a margin call which means you have to either put more money into the account to cover the margin loan or sell some of your stock to make up the X%.

I specifically put it all in a single high risk stock because I wouldn't do that with real money.

Pff, you got lucky.  But apparently that is the only way to make money in the stock market anyways.


Apparently everyone thought it was undervalued all of a sudden.

The only REAL way to make money in the stock market is with insider information which, of course, is illegal.  The best way is to get lucky, or to play on obvious trends like toy manufacturers around December.

Also, yeah, the whole buying on credit thing = bad idea, so I'm unloading about half my shares.  Effing transaction fees.

It sure doesn't make trades very fast. They aren't doing their part for the fake $19.95 commission.

I sold off about 1/3 of my portfolio today and I'm afraid to reinvest it until things stabilize.  I'm hoping that I can find something that bottomed out recently (HI2U tech stocks) and ride it back up to a norm, but I'm not sure if we've hit rock bottom yet.  I bought Yahoo at (what I thought was) the low point in a cycle and have lost 5k watching it drop another 4 points.  I R TEH STOCK NOOB.

I've lost $9k on GOOG so far.. been thinking of selling but then what if it rallies? Not sure I'll be able to regain 9k on another stock!

Of coarse it's going to rally because I sold mine just now :oh_i_see:. I'm going to sell it short and bank on it going to 600 based on what the charts say. It's up in after hours at the moment though.

I sold it short to the tune of just over a grand. I finally remembered to buy to cover it, so I can actually take my profit and run. Yay team.

The light of victory begins shining tomorrow.

Media stocks FTW.

-Sutro

Ah, the beauty that is untarnished enthusiasm. 

Uhm. I don't know if I broke the game or not, but I show myself at $250k someodd. Someone told me I made a bad decision, but I wonder if I broke the game because I have 10,000 shares of JAVAD when I should only have 2500.



Edit: In the name of fairness, I won't move on this stock until the month is up. It's not right that I broke the game. Anyway, I'm still whipping ya'll either way. :)

Maybe the game can't handle reverse splits so it gave you 1 to 4 instead of 4 to 1. Metagamer!

No, I see what happened. When the 1:4 split happened and transferred to JAVAD, the game never applied the 1:4 split. Effectively, it gave me 7500 free shares at 20.x a share.

USBE is going to go up according to my stateside source. However he's not to be trusted.

(http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/4619/ccerrorqp3.jpg)

This has been an interesting exercise and I learned a few things about the market I didn't know before.

It has also cemented my opinion that the stock market is fucking retarded and responsible for a lot of the problems in our country today.

Sold off all my stocks, not sure I'll buy new stuff. Not pouting because my stocks tanked, I don't really give a shit. It's just that I'm getting sickened by the idea that the best way to make money is to run contrary to any common sense. Citi gets fucked, I make bank shorting them. Oil prices go up, oil companies make bank (how many industries turn more profit when their raw materials get more expensive and their facilities lower in production??). ML and MS get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, exposing safe investors to subprime debt and despite the dollar tanking...still make money.

It's disgusting. I'll stay broke and happy.

Yah, I've always hated what the stock market does to companies. I mean, any company where the original founders do not own a controlling stake in the company are completely at the mercy of the "masses" who own their stock. How is that a good way to run a business?

But, it's not going away anytime soon.. I think I'll limit my stock play to my 401k.

I can't figure this out:


I don't get what this all means, specifically the part in bold.  Is that the interest rate on the money if you were to keep it in the bank?  Are they trying to say that money will generate a lot more money merely on interest, and this is a good thing that shows the company will keep rolling in the cash?

The way they word the article it looks like they're making Coke out to be a good investment.

Link if you want it (http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2007/11/13/two-ways-to-value-a-company.aspx?source=mppromo)

I think the best way to play the market in these games is to seek out stocks at the low point of the sin(x)/cos(x) graph and buy accordingly. I don't even know what half the fucking companies do, nor do I care.

If your stocks aren't doing so well this week, just hold onto them until next week... and so on and so forth.

Ooki:

No, that 4.6% is the revenue generated per year divided by the cost of owning the company.   SO: if you owned Coke in whole, you'd be making 4.6% of your money back each year, if things stay the way they exsist right now.

What they're saying is, buying Coke looks good if you think they can make that same money each year, or increase the amount made in the years following.

Like they said, it's a very quick and dirty way of deciding things that ignores a lot of other bits of investing knowledge.  I guess that you can ignore them when investing in a megacorp like Coke, because those are typically long-term investments and things that would cause it to crubmle will destroy the lesser of us long before it destroys the megacorp.

Since I have some time today to catass to victory while I'm inbetween classes, I'll give some forecasts for those of you who are in the red significantly using the stocks in some portfolios:

Two caveats: Blue chips tend to follow the market more closely than smaller $5-15 non-blue chips. I hesitate to make predictions on blue chips because one blue chip can rattle another even if it has nothing to do with the other company. See today's market performance and Wal-Mart. And the second, I'm by no means an expert. I'm not a savvy investor, nor do I have the money to play anything else except my 401k (Which currently is on pace for a 12.6% growth this year (woot!)). Take these suggestions at your own risk.

1) Sutro's Portfolio: PRM (http://www.marketwatch.com/quotes/prm) (Primedia Incorporated): $8.00/share; This stock has stayed dormant for a little while close to it's 52 week low (arguably due to the bank concerns); It doesn't have any negative PR lately; I moved on this and am looking at a target selling price of anywhere from $8.50 to $9.00/share.

2) Phildo's Portfolio: HAL (http://www.marketwatch.com/quotes/hal) (Halliburton Company): $36.75/share; This stock looks to be on a small downswing, so it is a riskier buy at this point; Looking at this in the short term, however, one may see a target selling price at $37.00 to $38.00/share.

3) Nebu's Portfolio: YHOO (http://www.marketwatch.com/quotes/yhoo) (Yahoo! Incorporated): $25.75/share; This stock is looking to make a big upswing; It just received good news in a PR report, making investors happy; I'd put a target selling price at around $27.00 to $29.00. This stock should be owned by everyone on here -- Yahoo! (even as a tech stock) is a steal at $25.75.

4) GD's Portfolio: HAS (http://www.marketwatch.com/quotes/has) (Hasbro Incorporated): $26.75/share; This stock isn't as hot as YHOO, but one could easily make another .50/share on it; I'd put a target selling price at about $27.25 or $27.50; Note that this stock will be highly influenced by the market, much like HAL.

5) Ookii's Portfolio: CSCO (http://www.marketwatch.com/quotes/csco) (Cisco Systems, Incorporated): $29.50/share; This stock should be a mover much like YHOO -- the 1mo has it on the upswing pretty nicely; I'd put a selling price at about $31.00 or so.

I've spent all my capital on a few of these stocks, so I might do some later after I make my sell orders.

Cheers, and I hope this helps everyone get away from the  :uhrr:

How about this:


http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2006/04/06/how-useful-is-the-peg-ratio.aspx (http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2006/04/06/how-useful-is-the-peg-ratio.aspx)

Can't get better than that.  Also http://cap.fool.com (http://cap.fool.com) looks worth checking out.

FIFY


-Sky

Thanks for the thoughts.  I'm ready to concede victory to you.  Your portfolio is going nuts.  It's downright impressive.

Ahahahaha.

Schild is a sneaky bastid.

I tried to be a smartass and sign my post as 'K a a' - sans the spaces.

 :awesome_for_real:

Oh they fixed the JAVAD debacle, now he's only beating us by a slightly unreasonable percentage, as opposed to a absolutely unreasonable amount.

Let the fight for second place commence!

For those of you that took my advice today:

At 1000 shares a pop,

PRM(8.14-8.00) = .14 * 1000 = $140.00  or 1.72%
HAL(37.45-36.75 = .70 * 1000 = $700.00 or 1.87%
YHOO(26.10-25.75 = .35 * 1000 = $350.00  or 1.34%
HAS(26.90-26.75) = .15 * 1000 = $150.00  or 0.56% (Note that I said it wasn't as hot as the others.)
CSCO(30.14-29.50) = .64 * 1000 = $640.00  or 2.12%

Not too shabby for one day's work. Personally, I bought PRM, YHOO and CSCO. I should've moved on HAL I suppose as well, though.

I think the next thing like this I post, I will show some stocks to short for some variation.

That's what I get for selling my AAPL stock *grumble* I knew I should have held on to it and wait for it to rebound more. Grr.

So how'd you figure all of that out?  The market did rally today so most stocks went up, but it seems like you actually know what you're doing in general.  Do you do like Warren Buffet and value a company yourself before seeing its stock price?

Or you could have bought ETFC and made 40%. Think I might jump on that tomorrow as it might move bigger than the VMWare I'm in now.

Stocks generally resemble  this  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sine_cosine_plot.svg). If you look at all of the graphs with possibly the exception of HAS, you'll notice most of those are at the bottom of that curve, heading toward an upward swing. Ookii is right in his criticism that I didn't outperform the market, but we'll see how today goes. If I'd have written that report at 6:00 yesterday morning, I'd have done much better; most of those stocks had over 4-8% gains yesterday (which would have outperformed the market significantly).

ETFC looks really volatile. Good luck!  :grin:

The 20 minute trade delay is pretty lame. Even if I had been up at 6:30 I wouldn't have been able to blow it out at that price.

(http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/2583/stocksfq5.jpg)

I am so getting in on the next one of these.

You should still get in, it's running until the end of the year. Hell, you'll start ahead of most of the pack ;)

You can get in on it now - it's open until the game ends.

Actually, it would probably be better to get in now considering we all took a punch last week.

Except for cmlancas, who can see into the future and shit.

I'll join too.

I can't be arsed to pay attention to it over the next few weeks, too many games. Also, more of those charts plz.

Eh, this is not easy when thinking short term... But it is more fun though.  :grin:

Here goes nothing. Hope I don't get my ass kicked too soon.

I got smoked today because IKEA opened in Orlando. I missed most of my target prices today and lost out on a chance to make 3% today. More holding onto my stocks then, I guess.

Bleh. But IKEA is fun. I spent $416.24 and decorated my entire apartment!  :awesome_for_real:

Bizarrely, WPO shat the bed today when the news on it was positive. Centerpoint gains outsize profits and climbs by .08.  :uhrr:

I do think, though, that Primedia is due two more days of upward mobility before it's dump time.

I heard that people were camping out to get free chairs for something like two days.  I'm staying as far away as possible until the clamor dies down.

Given how much longer you'll be in Florida, I can't imagine there's a single thing there you need.

Meatballs!

You're a fat bastard, Phil.

Your mama!

Your face.

And your mom's face.

<self-edited for lack of funny>

I'll get you one of these days, Schildo!

Late to the game, but I'd like to join in.  Says I need a password or some such.

f13stocks

I'll sell you my account.

Crap, the entire market is falling pretty bad right now.

[edit] Note to Krakrok : SELL, SELL, SELL

It's getting cold out here on this window ledge.

(http://www.movieactors.com/freezes1/TradingPlaces65.jpeg)
If Exxon/Mobile keeps diving, I might have to think about investing in it irl.  I thought 84 was a good price, and it's heading back down near there again already...

I'm investing in turkeys.

I really thought that Yahoo would adjust back to 29 or so.  I'm starting to think I was sadly mistaken.

:dead_horse:

(http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/8491/stocks2qh3.jpg)

I'm the only one in the green for the day?  That's sad. 

I don't think I'll be messing with tech stocks. Most of the dependable stuff is outrageously expensive, and the rest is a rollercoaster ride. The catalyst behind good tech stocks is "next big thing" syndrome. And you never know what the fuck the analysts are thinking what that next big thing may be. Usually it's something totally undeserving of attention (DivX or Classmates.com, for example), while the good companies get discarded for the smallest things.

I'd suggest not going nuts selling your stocks. Just wait for the market to stabilize a bit.  :-)

But yeah, today's figures look pretty terrible for me.

(http://gallery.7mph.com/albums/userpics/stockNov13.gif)

Yah, I'm doin' good....

Actually, wouldn't be bad if I could gain a little on that GOOG stock and either cut my losses or break even.

At least you didn't buy GOOG when it was 740....

Here comes a big rebound this morning. CSCO is already up almost a full dollar. Those of you holding onto techs might wish to make a move closer to noon or 3:00ish today.

Cheers, hope the gains are nice!  :awesome_for_real:

A rather interesting article which might complicate matters for the banks. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/business/15lend.html?em&ex=1195362000&en=2c1770369987fee8&ei=5087%0A)

Basically since so many mortgages have been put into pools, resold, repackaged and sold again if someone stops paying their mortgage how exactly can the business forclose when the rights to that asset are spread all over the place.

Primedia is a ROCKSTAR today. I wish I'd cmlancased it and weighted more heavily in a buy.

Lol, I've been playing for a shorter time than anyone, and already top in transactions. I'm finicky. Or is "bear-ish" the word?

Actually, I should have sold more today. I was ranked 2nd behind cmlancas for a bit, then one of my stocks took a nosedive. Luckily, I'm still green.

If it's any consolation, the delay in trading seems to be like a great equalizer.  I've sold off stocks only to find that my sell price was considerably lower due to a 30 min delay in the actual transaction.  I guess it's added realism... but I'm not sure how much I like it.

You could use that handy 'limit' option.

Bah... then I'd have to learn how to use it.  You smart-alec kids are always meddling in my stuff. 

I might actually be doing decently if I knew what half of the terms meant.

What I'm having trouble finding (even though I haven't looked that hard) are resources that showcase upcoming conferences calls and earnings report so I can see which stocks are worth investing in for the short term.

Have you tried www.marthastewart.com ?

I kid, I kid.

Making a comeback! We'll see how long that lasts.

(http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/7003/stocks3au9.jpg)

20% in a day?  Damn man... nice one!

Yeah. If if I could gather info sooner, I'd have jumped up at least 5% today with current stocks.

I am getting fucking MAULED in this goddamned thing. Can I take the virtual 100k and play poker instead? I can guarandamntee my ROI will be higher.

What the fuck. VSE fucking blows as a provider. It has fucked up two of my trades: Once with C long, and twice with PRM. It took a day and a half to process my sell order and it STILL HASN'T GONE THROUGH. PRM's gains have all but disappeared now.

Fuck.

I'm taking it real slow today. Just a few stocks in France Telecom. Easing up on everything else. I don't know what else to do for this week, and all stock exchanges are falling.

Well, here's how I understand it:

'Stop' orders buy or sell once a price hits a certain price level, however they only initiate at that price.  In other words, the actual amount will be at whatever the market price is when the order goes through.  In our case, it is 20 minutes later.

Example: buy a stock at $20 per share.  You can put in a stop sell order for $15 to prevent the loss of more than approximately $5 a share.  However if the stock is sliding fast the actual sell may be at $14 due to the 20 minute delay.

'Limit' orders are guaranteed to be at the price specified, either buy or sell.  In real accounts these trades cost more.  Not sure about in the game since I haven't done a limit order yet.

It shouldn't take six hours to make a trade. That's what I'm pissed about. I've participated in many stock market challenges and the like previous to this. VSE just sucks with its trading. Shit, for awhile I made $150,000 because they had no idea how to handle a reverse split.

Well I lost most of my gains all day and now they are back!  :grin:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=LVLT&t=1d

(http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/959/stocks4ac5.jpg)

Showoff.


If you guys can find a better stock simulation game, we can try it on the next game. I agree VSE does suck sometimes, but I haven't found a better one!

Edit: I r a god speler

I have to admit that I get a tiny bit of joy seeing cmlancas squirm.

Ahh, schadenfreude.

Haters. :)

I'm going to take a hit on Citigroup (because of a huge fuckup. Thanks VSE!), but the others will be gains.

I was just going to sit on XOM for the duration of the game, but damn I wish I still had that 1000 short C. C is going to take another whupping according to the news this morning (and yesterday, the day before, yada). Might want to dump it before it drags you down further. XOM is doing crappy, but at least I was able to dump KBR, my own previous albatross.

VSE is odd. The delay and I've seen a bunch of bugs, misdirected pages, won't save login. Little things, but lots of them.

Still... seems hard to complain about free entertainment.  I'd love for it to be better, but for now it's still entertaining and a welcome distraction from work.

Everyone was rocking. Now we're headed negative. The crappy thing is even though I have real time quotes I can't do anything about it for 20 minutes. Makes the game more fair I guess.

(http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/5117/stocks5zs5.jpg)

Doing daytrading with a 20m delay is like trying to play FPS competitively with a 400ms ping.

FRE and ETFC both getting destroyed.

Behold the power of Oil.

 :ye_gods:

Apparently stop orders don't work on sells? I tried to sell one with a higher stop but it sold it at current market price. Sigh.

Lots of things don't work on VSE.  :awesome_for_real:

And cmlancas falls (hard I might add)!  :-P

I don't see how today's numbers could possibly be right. My stock was up 0.94% on the day and it shows me down 2.74% unless it's docking me on my margin. Lots of other peoples numbers don't look right either.

Reaganomics?

Hey, Vonage lost it's final lawsuit appeal against Verizon and our stock went up.

It's a mystery to everybody.

Cramer says this happens when a lot of people short a stock, they end up making it go up!

VSE is extremely broken. If all of you could spare $5, I think I can look up the old game I used to play on where we won't have to play with broken toys. This broken toy is stabbing me hard. HARD I TELL YOU!


Anyway, grats to those of you doing well. I'm taking it in the ass.  :ye_gods:

See if it still exists, I'm sure everyone will who aren't cheap.

I'm hoping that Fool.com will add "game" support to their CAP stuff. We can look at this one for the next game:

http://simulator.investopedia.com/


I'm having a hard time finding a new stock to invest in to regain my losses .. if anyone has any suggestions.  :oops:

Not always to be followed, but a good bet is generally those companies that have an effect on and/or are needed by multiple industries. For example, anyone involved with steel, machine and tool makers, geological/surveying companies to an extent..

(http://img240.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vsef13112607cn7.jpg)


I don't see that as a good thing. I'm getting paranoid.


[edit] Imageshack's at a crawl... Something should be showing up here.

Don't sweat. I lost like 9 points in the last hour today. Stocks are fucking retarded.

I jumped 7, went down to 6... But I'm just wondering if I should pull out now (main stock is John Deere at the moment).

It's 10:30 AM CST. Miguel has already jumped up.... 14%. His profile has no stocks. Wtf?

He had C short and bought a cover for it today so he could have sold it short at 32 and then bought it at 30 which would have been $2 a share he made.

In other news I am totally screwed. My percents haven't been right for over a week either. Totally lost my ass in GOOG again.

GOOG sucks - I don't think I can recover from it. :P

Pulling out of Deere while I'm ahead! Definitely have a Day Trader mentality...

Shorting C this week looked like a no-brainer to me.  :wink:

They just announced another cash infusion (7B!), I'll have to see how it plays out tomorrow.

I've been travelling for the last 4 days.  I'm afraid to look. 

I think the program is broken. How am I in the green? I haven't been making trades lately because MY VSE IS BROKEN AND WON'T LET ME, but I'm still in first.

 :uhrr:

Oh. Here's my for real stock market game:

(http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/1334/my401kng8.jpg)

That's a 4.87% gain so far. My next gain on January 2008 will be much better probably because my company's stock didn't do so well last quarter and I swooped in and bought it up.

Edit: Oh yeah. I'll have a 100% + X gain because they are matching a full $750.00. Hell yeah! :D

Shit, I knew I should have kept a clean slate today. I lost like 3000 already. Damn this second place shit!

See page #2 of this thread.

I already learned that lesson.

Yah I missed that. Apparently 'limit' orders work like stop orders on sells - I'll limit at 5.50 and it'll sell at 5.59 by the time it executes.

Gotta start somewhere .. my 401k is doing lousy this year with the stocks being down, at 4.1% right now but am usually in the 8% area for the year by December. We'll see how it turns out. My company matches %1 per %2 I put in, so if I do 6% they'll do 3% (their max) for a total of 9% a pay check.

So I guess 9% + 4.1% isn't so bad, though really I guess that's 3% + 4.1% in free money.  :grin:

Eh, I guess in hindsight maybe staying with Investopedia was the way to go.

USBE has jumped from $7 to $8, seems my friend was on to something.

Good day today, the stocks are finally correcting themselves.

"Plexiglass."

"Had it installed Last week."

Damn Miguel.. 20% ? ? ? ? ! ! !


I pulled out of Deere way too early.  :cry: They jumped another 10 points today.

One thing that has helped out a lot: forget market sell orders.  Do all exchanges with limit orders.  There seems to be a big discrepancy between the bid and ask prices in VSE compared to Etrade and the others.  The price you see is rarely what you will get.  Instead, check the price on a realtime stock ticker (like finance.yahoo.com) and base your limits on that. 

Example: you see Amazon at $10 in Etrade.  The ask price is $10.10.  Put in your buy order in VSE for market price.  Say you get it for $10.12.  Then, if you are betting long, put in a limit sell at $10.15.  so long as the stock hits $10.15 the limit will go through despite the 20 minute lag that you would have never seen inside of VSE's screens.

It seems to be the only way to make sure you buy and sell close to the price you wanted, not what the tool thinks the price is when the order goes through.  Remember no real shares are being exchanged, the VSE tool simply waits 20 minutes and then gives you whatever the bid/ask is at that time, however with limit orders you will always get AT LEAST what you wanted.

:( :(

I think I'll just sit on my current stocks. CBF with this annoying system.

I think I can adjust that .. letsee...

Edit: Adjusted to $0.00, try now. Not that penny stocks are much fun! Cheater!

Nah still doesn't work.

Worked just fine for me, I bought 100 shares of DKSC.

USBE hits $9 and now I'm winning! Woo.

If only it were real money.

Ha! Should have bought into Interplay today. Up almost 40%.

After 34 trades and days of sweat and tears, I am now up 1! 20 out of 22 baby!

Edit: Nevermind, I guess the game doesn't close until midnight - for aftermarket trading and all.

Will post actual winner later!

It's golf scoring right?  :oh_i_see:

The service was broken ><

 :pedobear:

Bah, who is Kidder? I thought I won, I was first over the weekend :P

My strategy: Dick Cheney. Put all your money in the bad companies that rob people blind and do whatever they can get away with sort of legally. Especially if you have a former officer in the VP office. And then I went for oil for the final push, and sold when it hit a pretty good high. Got Exxon at a nice low for the season. No trades after I sold off the XOM, hoped being 12k up would net the win...and I would've if it had ended Sunday, heh.

Still...I didn't make 12k irl in the last 2 months!

I want in on the next round of games. Who's running this popsicle stand?

Oh, I lost.. I thought I was gold when i was 10k up half a month ago.. I should have checked it again  :awesome_for_real:

Can someone screenshot and imageshack the final full chart?

(http://gallery.7mph.com/albums/upload/Misc_Pictures/vse_winner_dec07.png)

Do we want to use VSE again for another one or should we try this other one (http://simulator.investopedia.com/ (http://simulator.investopedia.com/))?

I didn't care for Investopedia when I looked, but I haven't found any other options.

Not last!

If I have some time today I'll look for other ones, it would be :awesome_for_real: if other people would as well so we could find an awesome replacement for VSE.

We should find another one. VSE touched me in naughty places when it decided it was too good to let me trade any of my stocks anymore.

 :uhrr:

I can look around too -- I like stock market challenges that work.

Congrats to those at the top.  This is certainly harder than it appears on the surface and I was humbled by the experience.  Next time, I'm getting some inside info from Martha Stewart.

Just pick legal things that are closest to crack. Never go wrong investing in crack! People love it!  :ye_gods: