Game Rules

Game Rules

TRADING HOURS

The game is following general rules of American stock exchanges where working hours are 9:30 am to 4:00 pm, Monday through Friday. Market is generally closed on weekend and holidays, in those days you will see red warning "Market Closed" on your game timer screen.

SECURITY TYPES

Only a subset of stocks is available for game players. There are about 400 stocks are available at any given game date. We started with S&P 500 stock list as of July 2008 and loaded historical prices for all of them.

Security types other than stocks are not available at this time.

ORDER TYPES

The order types available are market and limit.

• Market - A market order indicates you want the immediate execution of an order for a stated number of shares at or near the current market price without any other restrictions. This means your order will seek execution once it is received by the market (as long as the security is trading). Keep in mind that prices can change quickly in fast market conditions, resulting in execution prices that are different from the quotes displayed at order entry.
• Limit - A limit order indicates the highest price you are willing to pay for a security, or the lowest price you are willing to accept to sell a security. Your order will be executed at your designated price or better. This helps protect your order from sudden volatility, but it also means you will only buy or sell the security if it reaches the price you're seeking. A limit order also allows you to specify a time period within which your order remains active-it will seek to completely fill your order at your limit price until the time period ends, after which your order will expire.

To summarize: A market order seeks immediate execution at the next available price or prices. A limit order seeks a certain price or better but may not fill if the market never reaches your specified limit price.

ORDER TERMS

There are two kinds of limit orders you can specify.

• Day order expires at the end of the day it was booked into account.
• GTC (good until cancelled) expires within 1 year since it was booked into account.

ORDER STATUS

• Open is an active but not executed order. You can cancel open Limit order at any time.
• Executed is a fulfilled order. All fulfilled orders change your portfolio and may be seen in "Balance & Positions" and "Gain/Loss" views.
• Expired is a limit order which could not be fulfilled before expiration date because of market price did not meet you requirements.

STOCK PRICES

The game operates with historical split adjusted prices. It means that a modification made to a security's price that takes into consideration the effect of a split on the total number of shares or units outstanding, in order to compare the security's current price to its historical price in a consistent form of valuation. In order to adjust a security's price, the post split price would be multiplied by the split ratio (or ratios if multiple splits had occurred) in order to get a split-adjusted price.

Keeping in mind that for the game stock2own randomly generates daily price spread, all day prices are always between historical split adjusted low and high price for the day.

STARTING DATE AND BALANCE

Starting date and balance are determined by the user and can be in the following range:

• Starting Date is any date between January 2, 1991 and January 2 of previous year. The default setting is January 2, 1991.
• Starting Balance can be any amount from $100 to $1,000,000. The default value is $1000.

COMMISSION

Commission or brokerage fees are determined by the user and can be any value from 0 to $100 per trade. The default value is $10.

Note: Commission increases cost basis and decreases proceeds. In other words, commission adjusts total cost and total proceeds and it's adjustment calculated by the following rule:

• Buy Order - commission will be added to the total cost of Buy Order. Commission increases cost basis.
• Sell Order - commission will be subtracted from the total proceeds of Sell Order. Commission decreases proceeds.

PERFORMANCE TRACKING

The game portfolio ranks performance absolutely and calculates Gain/Loss as a simple ratio of the start and end value of the portfolio.

GAME SCORE

For each played day the player will receive a point. Player will also receive 10000 points for each percent of approximate annual growth rate of player's portfolio adjusted by inflation rate (average annual inflation rate of 2.9%). If the performance of the player drops below default inflation rate, game score may become negative (it means that player is loosing money).

It does not matter how much money you start with. The more game days you can play maintaining high rate of return, the better your score is going to be.

GAME CLOCK

When you click "Play" button, the game clock starts ticking. The basic time interval is 15 minutes. Game clock will add 15 minutes every 2 seconds.

The player has ability to run the clock in the following modes:

• Default mode ("Play"). In the default "play" mode 15 minutes of game time will pass every 2 seconds of real time.
• End of the day button set clock to the end of the market day (4 pm).
• Next Day button set clock to the next day morning (9:30 am).
• Next Week button moves clock 7 days forward.

GAME LENGTH

Game starts at choosing start date and will be ended if you reach today date or if the balance of your game portfolio drops below commission per trade.

LIMITATIONS

Only US stock trades are supported at this time.

No corporate actions will be applied to the game portfolio.

No tax regulations, such as Wash Sales adjustments, supported in the game portfolio. Game portfolio cannot be used to calculate tax estimate.

No marginal trades or interest on uninvested cash will be applied in the game portfolio.

Remember: THIS IS A GAME! All data provided here is based on actual historical data but may be altered. Information is provided 'as is' and solely for training purposes, not for trading purposes, actual market analysis or advice.

Top