MarketWatch Investing Game anyone?

I figured it out. For some reason each stock has a restriction. (Legality in the real world?)

I just can't figure out why Mazda has a restriction of 5.

Where are these "rules" of which you speak??

I can't find anything other than the Rules and Admin tab, which doesn't say anything about this.

This is getting out of hand for me, though.

WU-TANG FINANCIAL

In reply to Swank Force One:

Same problem here, won't even let me place an order for 1 stock on something.....

As I told SFO, I'm going all in on pork futures. Gonna ride the bacon bubble.

I'm in. Sounds like fun. I've always wanted to play the stock market on things I know (cars, computers, etc), but never had enough "disposable income" to risk on it.

Thanks for setting it up.

-Rob

I'll take a look to see if I can figure out why you can't buy something. My 1st thought was there is a 1% trading volume limit. For example, if a company only has 100 shares trade hands per day, you can only buy 1 at a time. The game does that because realistically, if you had a buyer that wanted to buy a significant block, it would start to put upward pressure on the stock price that the game can't account for. I don't know why you can only buy 5 shares of Mazda though. That doesn't seem to be a valid explanation for that.

As for the buying power. What I think it is doing is it is just deducting the amount of the value of the investments from the buying power but will not actually deduct it from your "cash remaining" until trading opens. Your buying power has decreased because you have an open order but you haven't actually bought it yet so it doesn't deduct the cash - I think. Kinda like a preauthorization on your debit card. Think retail: Amazon will check to see if you have the money in your account, your bank sets that money aside, and when it ships, then the money is actually pulled from your account. So a pending charge really. I'm pretty sure that's what's doin' there.

I'm going to try this out. I am behind the curve investment-wise at my age, this will be a good educational experience!

Any way to tell up front what the individual stock limits are? I could barely buy any stock in Porsche (like under $10k) but I could drop a larger amount in General Dynamics...

I'm in last place! I'll populate my list tomorrow some time, thanks for setting this up, sir!

I'm in too.

Making my purchases now. Damn this feels like gambling...not a good feeling!

My portfolio is going to be a who's-who of interesting companies...but not always in ways you might expect

In reply to jsquared:

Which symbol are you trying to buy? If it is POAHF (Porsche Automobil Holding SE Pfd), that only has an average volume of 4847 shares trading per day. The game has a 1% limit - meaning you can only buy 1% of the average shares trading per transaction. So, in this case, you could only buy 48 shares at a time. The reason for the limit - since this is a simulation, MarketWatch has no ability to account for the upward pressure you would put on the stock price if you tried to buy say, 5000 shares. But in your case, if you wanted to buy 200 shares, you would have to buy like 40 shares, 5 times, to get your 200 shares. That 1% limit really is the only way to account for the movement you would cause (in real life).

Now if we look at General Dynamics, for instance, they have an average daily volume of 1.4 million shares. So in this case, you could buy 14,000 shares at a time - which would be all of your initial budget + 700k of your margin.

In reply to Swank Force One:

What was the Mazda symbol you were trying to buy? That'll help me figure out what is going on.

In reply to jsquared:

Primary reason for setting this up.

I can't stress enough to people. If you find yourself in January you are down 2 or 300,000......this isn't about winning or losing - this is about learning. Figuring out what forces caused your investments to go sour - and posting questions to figure out if your logic is sound for wanting to hold that investment. This is the only way to learn.

At the end of this, if you are in last place and you were holding Weyerhauser and hypothetically, that took a dive, I want you to be able to look back and say, "Well since they provide lumber products, I should've paid attention to building permits. No building permits means no houses which means no need for lumber products." If you can learn to look at your investments in this game like that, even if you finish in 15th, I don't think you've lost.

If anyone has a specific question about a stock or whatever you are trying to buy, what will help me is if you also post the symbol of that stock. I think some of the things you guys might be trying to buy are American Depository Receipts which, maybe the easiest way to explain it is a foreign listed stock that a bank holds and trades on an American exchange.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/adr.asp

Again, for those who are noob at this, these are the kinda terms I'm hoping everyone at least becomes fimiliar with. Not to make your life more complex - just to make you have a better understanding of what might be going on in your 401k's or whatever.

Oh and I have to say, 17 of us are signed up. That's a pretty good number! Certainly the more the merrier but I actually didn't think that many would sign up.

Can you trade prior to the game starting that as soon as it opens you're already rolling?

CamaroKeith wrote: In reply to Swank Force One: What was the Mazda symbol you were trying to buy? That'll help me figure out what is going on.

MZDAF

Also: Gopro berkeleyed me big time yesterday.

PHeller wrote: Can you trade prior to the game starting that as soon as it opens you're already rolling?

Yep, that's what a few of us did. I would suggest double-checking your stocks before the open one more time, though. I was heavily invested into GoPro, but with their announcement yesterday, i'm sure i'm missing out on some big gains, and my money won't get as many stocks when it opens tomorrow.

I'm really surprised at the number of you buying individual stocks.

We should have a side bet and see who can most closely predict the value of their portfolio 1 year from now (must be 95%+ invested)

There's one I'm gonna wait to buy because I think it's on a spike now...but with just a few hours to go there shouldn't be any huge changes. I dunno about you but I'm pretty much going to sit on these for a year.

Sucks you bought before the GoPro cheap camera announcement!

How can find out what stocks are about to go public, say you want to get in on a company that is going public for the first time?

IE: Initial Public Offering (IPO)?

ProDarwin wrote: I'm really surprised at the number of you buying individual stocks. We should have a side bet and see who can most closely predict the value of their portfolio 1 year from now (must be 95%+ invested)

I didn't know how to do anything else.

PHeller wrote: How can find out what stocks are about to go public, say you want to get in on a company that is going public for the first time? IE: Initial Public Offering (IPO)?

Watch the news.