The Financial Fraternity group I have co-founded in Sacramento are launching a competition to gain some practice with the stock market and researching, analyzing, and discussing about stocks and mutual funds. We started a private game at Virtual Stock Exchange and going to experiment with this site. This so far, is an extremely useful website to gain practical experience with the stock market, and definitely worth checking out.

Here are the guidelines for the competition:

• Each player gets $100,000.00 play money
• The duration of this 1st competition will last 90 days, beginning 1/14/08 through to 4/14/08
• All participants must have submitted their portfolio by Monday, 1/21/08.
• You required to invest at least $80,000.00, and you have an option of saving $20,000 to invest in another stock later in the competition. Besides that, you have to ride out the original $80,000 and cannot change it.
• There is a $5.00 buy-in for each participant
• Whoever earns the biggest profit gains after 90 days will win the pot, second keeps their money.
• Everyone in the Financial Fraternity playing will bring their picks to next Monday’s meeting, and from there we will kick off the competition

This is our first project/experiment with a focus on the stock market, and anyone outside of the group are also invited to join, just contact me via email. If you have any suggestions or advice, it would be greatly appreciated as well! I will track my picks on this when the competition starts next Monday.