Wall Street Survivor. You may have heard this website echoing throughout Academic Magnet during this past week. Learn how to trade, practice trading, and earn virtual money through trading: wallstreetsurvivor.com is designed to educate people about stocks. With this program, you can learn the basic rules for investment, practice these methods by playing with an interactive stock market, and risk virtual cash to try and maximize profits. One key component of this website is the presence of leagues, or groups that you can join and compete in with your friends or even random people. The Investment Club of AMHS started a two-month long league, open to whoever has the password. This quickly became prevalent throughout the school, and within a week, the league has 79 members.

The game starts you off with $100,000. With this initial capital, you can invest in real-world stocks, as the stock market in the game mirrors the stock market with 100% accuracy. Competitors are ranked by their percent ROI, or return on investment. This is calculated by subtracting the portfolio value (the value of all of your current shares plus cash left over) by 100,000, and then dividing by 100,000. For example, if I had 103,453$, I would have a % return of 3.45%.

This number was not made up; it is actually my current ROI in the game. I have been in first place since I first joined, and this is because I have done extensive research on the stock market. You might not want to spend as much time as I did learning about the dos and donts of the market, so I am going to share with you my tips for becoming a successful virtual trader.

First rule: do not invest in large, well-known companies, at least not for a period this small. In the real world, yes, invest in companies like Coca Cola or Starbucks or Apple, but in a two-month simulation, it’s all about the day trading. Which brings me to my second point.

Second rule: If you are going to day trade, do some research regarding what stocks you are thinking about buying. Look at the graphs of the stock, and analyze the trends. One method I use is to look at the one-day and five-day period graphs. If the stock seems to be crashing and then leveling into a slope closer to 0, then buy. If the stock is rising at a slope of 1 or higher, it is too late for you to buy as a day-trader.

Third rule: Buy low sell high. The main website I use to find what stock I want to buy is https://finance.yahoo.com/screener. I normally check out the Day Gainers and Day Losers to figure out which stock is going to trend upwards. In the Day Losers category, the website displays which stocks had the highest negative % change during the previous day. This is how I make most of my money. For example, if a stock has gone down 25% in the last day, and is close to its 52-week low (meaning that the stock is close to being the lowest it has ever gotten to in the past year), then I buy. Odds are that this stock will not reach its 52-week low, and will rise again in the next 24 hours. Also, the cheaper the stock is, the higher quantity you can buy on Wall Street Survivor, so I usually aim for cheaper stocks. For example, most of my stocks are priced at under $5. With this method, I have day-traded dozens of stocks in the past week, and I have done extremely well – first place.

Here is what people think about the game so far:

“I like it, it’s cool, we just need a better website” – Kevin Woods

“I feel like it is too short term to actually see who’s good at the stock market. It has a lot to do with luck” – Potter

“It’s a good game and a good simulation. A good risk-free way to learn about the market. Also I’ve been in the top 3 all week, so it’s more fun.” – Nate

“I think it’s a little hard to get accurate results because we’re only doing it for two months” – Carter

“I feel like it’s something fun to mess around with in school” – Connor Coleman

“I don’t play that stupid ahh game dawgg” – Caperz

“It’s interesting but a big time commitment” – Gabi

“I’m losing and it’s great” – Katie

“I don’t know” – Lucia

This was only the first week of the league, so anything can change in the next 2 months. Good luck!