re: 2015 TDMTFSS (SECOND Standings Update, 3/20/2015)

rookie creeping up the leaderboard today!! Im a teacher and damn everytime I start teaching I feel like I miss out on something big!!

I cheated (a little)- I looked to see what the leader was buying/shorting, and it kept jumping up and down in the same range, so I just kept following the trends, pocketing about $30-40K per transaction.

If only I had $1 million real dollars...

Well, I DO have more than a million dollars in my brokerage trading accounts and let me assure you real life trading is nothing like what we're doing in the game.

Being somewhat skeptical, I'd be willing to bet the game is sponsored by the brokerage firms which advertise regularly on the pages we go to in the game because they hope to get some people thinking day trading is easy and very profitable so they open brokerage accounts and off they go trading like crazy!

By the time they realize the real world is unlike the game they made so money playing, it's too late and they've lost half their money.

I have to admit what yall are doing is impressive. And I know I'd never be able to day trade like this. Hell I got fired up today when I refreshed the page and was down 50k...refreshed again and was up 40k....then went back down 20k. Hahaha.

I keep telling myself it's fantasy game...but damn I like winning too much.

I trade pre-market & after hours frequently. What is your specific question about it? There's really nothing much to "explain" but I'll try to help if I can.

Well my portfolio only says I am down a little shy of 4,000. It was pretty tough looking down the barrel at losing 15k in 2 hours today. I might not have had the stomach for that if this is real.

I am still down 9k on the CTL mistake but Zoes and Phillip Morris got my back as I have made about 12k with them. But all of my timber stocks tanked today except Weyerhauser. I don't get why and don't see any info about it. PCL and UFS should both be on the up and up. I sold my PCL shares before it went off too hard.

Ive only lost 0.22 a share on UFS, so only about $400 not too harsh.

I need CTL to get back over $39 tomorrow though so I can cash out.. 31000 shares is too much skin in the game for me.

I don't think you can trade after hours in this game.

quote:

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So people can actually trade in pre- and after hours trading?

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Yes, every trading day. Schwab's pre-market trading starts at 7 AM Central Time and after market trading lasts until 7 PM Central Time.

Volume is thin which means a 1,000 share order can move the market price sometimes.

Anything else?

I played that yesterday and found a winner in FMI. Burnt the better part of a work day though. I think I'm going to try to treat it more "real" for a bit. but I agree, it was a little thrilling even though it's fake money and unrealistic.

To Brink and everyone else playing the investment game, I'm going to drop out of the game.

Yesterday afternoon I discovered what I thought was a one-time only or temporary glitch in the game vs. my Schwab trading screen, StreetSmartPro.

Long story short, I discovered I could do a perfect arbitrage in the game's trading screen every time I traded by comparing the game's prices to my Schwab trading screen's prices. That goes for any stock or ETF all the time.

If you look at my trading yesterday and today you'll see that I made $217,000 trading profit yesterday and I've made just under $309,000 today in the first 2 1/2 hours of trading. That's more than I made all of the five trading days last week plus on this Monday before I discovered the arbitrage advantage yesterday afternoon.

If I continued to play the game I could probably make up to or maybe even well over $1 million/day every day just by making the maximum allowable $$ amount of buys or short sales repeatedly during every day.

Yesterday when I saw the arbitrage I thought it was a temporary anomaly between the screens but today I'm convinced it's a permanent, and unfair, advantage that makes me look like an investment genius (which I'm not) and it also probably spoils the game for others who don't have the arbitrage advantage I have.

I don't want to spoil the game for others. That wasn't why we set up this game.

At least now I know how the HFT traders at Goldman Sachs feel!

So, I'll either delete my game's name or I just won't make any more trades starting now.

Good luck to everyone else!