failing like never before

Not too long ago, I wrote an article about why I thought stocksquest.com is lame. It would appear that a lot of people want to cheat at stocksquest's market simulation, so I'm going to describe in depth, a very simple way to make tons of money at stocksquest.

(Note, just reading the indented sections will give you the bare minimum you need to know to beat stocksquest.)

Stocksquest doesn't update their stock prices in real time. That is, there is a noticeable lag between the real stock prices and prices displayed on the stocksquest website. If you're using stocksquest then you're probably using Yahoo Finance to track prices, and like most stock price trackers, Yahoo Finance is behind the real time stock prices by about fifteen minutes. But stocksquest is at least thirty minutes behind the real time stock prices. Which means that you can buy stocks in stocksquest and know that they'll go up in price in a very short amount of time, because you've already seen them go up in Yahoo Finance (or whatever site you use for tracking prices).

Now, most teachers already know of this flaw in stocksquest and so they'll require that you hold a stock for a certain amount of time before selling it. The idea is, is that a volatile stock that jumps in price in the space of ten minutes probably isn't going to stay high till the next day. Thus, by enforcing a minimum holding period, the ability to "know the future" becomes useless.

But there is another way to predict the future.