Stock Market Challenge!

[Restrikted]

I've been really interested in the stock market lately, and as I'm not ready to invest real money in the market, I looked for a game where I could invest fake money in the market...And succeeded. It's called Virtual Stock Exchange. You can also host your own games on it as well, so I decided to create one for the people in the forum so that we can play against each other in a quest to see who is the best investor amongst us (I'm probably the worst).

Anyway, If your interested in playing, the game officially starts on Feb. 10 and ends exactly one year later. From there, we will see who was able to generate the most money, and be crowned the best investor of all Smart People!

It starts in two days, which is plenty of time to set up an account (it takes like two seconds).

IMPORTANT: To find the game, you must enter the name as StevePavlina, with the capitals, as it is case-sensitive, and no space.

Anyone interested?

[Brutha]

Anyway, If your interested in playing, the game officially starts on Feb. 10 and ends exactly one year later. From there, we will see who was able to generate the most money, and be crowned the best investor of all Smart People!

Being a good investor has a lot to do with managing your risk and not with betting everything on a few factor which would increase your chances of winning in a game like this.

[dmauder]

I'd love to participate in this, but I don't want to go about it randomly. What I would love to do is test a trading strategy of some sort and see how it works.

For the longest time, I've been wanting to find a mechanical stock trading system that I can use.

Does anyone know of a system/strategy out there that consistently works over the long haul?

Right now, the only one that makes any sense and appeals to me is NoLoad FundX. However, it's a mutual fund / ETF strategy, so it moves a little slow and you don't trade very often. Not saying that is a bad thing, but I was looking for something that deals more with individual stocks.

From that standpoint, value investing (ie. Rule #1) looks the best, but it's hard to find those stocks. In other words, I don't know how to find them, and I don't want to pay a ton of money to someone else to do it for me! I'd rather learn how myself. :-)

Dave

[Restrikted]

I've been reading Jim Cramers book (Real Money) lately and its pretty good, he talks a lot about how speculation is a good thing, because that's where you make the biggest gains. The "mechanical" way that he describes that most people use is measure the P/E ratio to the EPS, and measure that against either a competitor's stock or an index like the S&P 500. That's how you would determine if a stock is undervalued or overvalued.

It seems hard to find stocks that are under or over valued, but that's what makes it fun. You get to research them and try to figure out if they are about to make a move or plummet.

And with regards to Brutha, it would be just stupid if your portfolio was made up of only a couple speculative stocks. The point of the game isn't to win, it's to learn more about the market, what makes it tick, and to share this info with everyone else. That's my goal anyway. I want to in a few years start to put some real money in the market, but I have everything to learn still.