stocksquest « failing like never before

20Apr/0877

How To Cheat At Stocksquest

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.

Tagged as: cheat, market, stocksquest Continue reading

1Apr/085

Stocksquest, A Review

There are numerous schools that use stocksquest.com, an online stock market simulation, as a teaching tool. The point of the simulation is to mimic perfectly the real stock market, the only exception being the use of fake money. Real stocks can be bought and sold at real market prices, and students can perform market research and read news articles in order to help their performance in the simulation, just like in real life (theres a lot of "real" here for a simulation) The point of course, is to show students how the stock market functions and how to make money in a relatively easy manner. Stocksquest even adds a little extra fun in, allowing teachers to create class or school wide competitions so that students can battle each other out for financial success. My high school economics class engaged in a stocksquest competition, and you can see the final class rankings here. As you can see, a few students ended the contest with ridiculously huge amounts of money. While most of the class had made or lost between 15% of their money, there were a few that ended with unrealisticly huge percent gains. Once would of course assume that these students cheated. Although in this case, cheating is rather a strong word, especially since the system invites it.

There are other online stock market simulations available, some of them as free as stocksquest, and I would highly encourage teachers to sample other sites before selecting stocksquest for use in the class room. Hopefully, some of the flaws of stocksquest that I will investigate later in this article will be evidence enough to convince teachers to select a different simulation.

Tagged as: problems, Stocks, stocksquest, win Continue reading

3Feb/084

Draw Me In

I looked through my stats and log files today (instead of doing my homework), and determined which articles were drawing the most visitors to my site. Mind you, this was not an in-depth study, just a cursory glance at my stats.

Dynamically Create a Multidimensional Array in C/C++ - The most popular article on my site was a new one. It would appear that lots of people were searching for ways to dynamically create a multidimensional array and Google kindly linked them to my site.
more stocksquest - This one surprised the crap out of me (pardon my Klatchian). Back in high school, I had nothing else to put on my blog, so I posted my econ class's stocksquest rankings (notice who's number one). It would appear that lots of people use internet search engines to search for their own name. Since pretty much none of my classmates were vaguely famous on the internet, the ones with fairly unique names ended up at my site. Funny how that works out. I bet none of them ever realized whose site they found themselves looking at.
problems with gallery - So apparently lots of people have problems with an uninitialized constant when using attachment_fu. Back when I was working on my blog CMS, I had a problem with attachment_fu and I posted the error message on my blog. I found a solution eventually, which I still remember today because the error was particularly annoying. Basically what happened was there was a misspelled variable name, and if I remember correctly, I copied that code fragment from another site (which would explain why everyone is having the exact same error). I remember that I spent forever looking and it turned out that one of the variable names was spelled beginning with a lowercase letter, which resulted in the uninitialized error. Sorry that I can't remember the exact name of that variable or where it was, but it was almost a year ago.

And thats it folks...

Tagged as: array, attachment_fu, multidemsional, popular, stocksquest 4 Comments

1May/070

more stocksquest

Contest Rankings
Rank		Name	Total Value	% Gain	# Trades
1.	View	chi	85519.44	755.19	80
2.	View	michael mendoza	24866.90	148.67	40
3.	View	Ben Driscoll	15778.95	57.79	78
4.	View	Bharath Ganesh	14174.96	41.75	31
5.	View	Travis Coots	13646.89	36.47	90
6.	View	Sarah Czarnecki	12800.59	28.01	39
7.	View	john ward	11793.03	17.93	59
8.	View	Melissa Gray	11419.12	14.19	13
9.	View	Bob Wright	11285.18	12.85	17
10.	View	daniel ngui	10956.86	9.57	109
11.	View	Chris Meyers	10893.37	8.93	22
12.	View	kortney slater	10850.86	8.51	114
13.	View	Elizabeth Allen	10746.80	7.47	48
14.	View	Josh Ruff	10577.27	5.77	26
15.	View	cody goodridge	10572.36	5.72	18
16.	View	Zack Conley	10434.36	4.34	40
17.	View	Lauren Sedgwick	10404.00	4.04	19
18.	View	Lindsay Dworman	10395.54	3.96	32
19.	View	Claire Campo	10361.92	3.62	20
20.	View	audrey gandy	10344.96	3.45	13
21.	View	ChristyAnna Zimmerman	10330.15	3.30	17
22.	View	Chris Kwee	10325.39	3.25	26
23.	View	Matt Bogert	10188.31	1.88	30
24.	View	joe sowa	10184.25	1.84	22
25.	View	Lauren Bernau	10175.82	1.76	46
26.	View	Anthony Wiedrick	10157.54	1.58	31
27.	View	Christina Davis	10149.64	1.50	19
28.	View	Danielle Brill	10130.03	1.30	18
29.	View	Lucas Clark	10104.90	1.05	18
30.	View	Joanna Gross	10061.50	0.61	61
31.	View	Elliott Hull	10025.74	0.26	0
32.	View	danny ngui	10025.19	0.25	0
33.	View	david umina	10025.19	0.25	0
34.	View	pete tate	10025.19	0.25	0
35.	View	Vanessa Miranda	10019.53	0.20	1
36.	View	robyn lashley	10006.15	0.06	64
37.	View	Kevin Schumm	9990.90	-0.09	35
38.	View	Elizabeth Guza	9986.93	-0.13	25
39.	View	Emily Christensen	9959.17	-0.41	31
40.	View	Erica Wilens	9931.59	-0.68	8
41.	View	John Bartel	9921.46	-0.79	30
42.	View	Claire Heller	9915.74	-0.84	7
43.	View	Ashley Garrett	9913.15	-0.87	29
44.	View	nick thomy	9904.98	-0.95	15
45.	View	Meredith Price	9899.61	-1.00	26
46.	View	Camden Ash	9898.92	-1.01	38
47.	View	Elliott Hull	9888.55	-1.11	50
48.	View	Donell Cooper Jr	9847.79	-1.52	33
49.	View	Erika Caietti	9832.24	-1.68	32
50.	View	Ivan Otsuka	9828.00	-1.72	40
51.	View	Kaity Whittaker	9826.60	-1.73	48
52.	View	Alexandra Broyles	9814.06	-1.86	37
53.	View	Kaity Tully	9805.28	-1.95	41
54.	View	Claire Hellar	9800.44	-2.00	22
55.	View	Matthew Yost	9785.64	-2.14	39
56.	View	Eric Presnall	9779.08	-2.21	47
57.	View	Mike Terranova	9774.95	-2.25	24
58.	View	Emily Alpert	9773.82	-2.26	24
59.	View	Brandon Davis	9768.21	-2.32	30
60.	View	Shane Morosky	9765.42	-2.35	19
61.	View	Caitlyn Huber	9762.49	-2.38	37
62.	View	Ivan Otsuka	9749.97	-2.50	42
63.	View	Matt Hanson	9737.70	-2.62	25
64.	View	pete tate	9724.96	-2.75	18
65.	View	Sara Miller	9723.98	-2.76	16
66.	View	Dana Mangseth	9718.22	-2.82	22
67.	View	alex anticevich	9698.52	-3.01	29
68.	View	Dana Stoller	9651.62	-3.48	14
69.	View	Amanda Gulyas	9615.35	-3.85	38
70.	View	Matt Anderson	9601.48	-3.99	22
71.	View	Shannon Lee	9597.80	-4.02	57
72.	View	Christina Shuler	9584.83	-4.15	23
73.	View	maziar salimi	9583.28	-4.17	23
74.	View	Jacob Ricks	9548.03	-4.52	36
75.	View	Kayla Schureman	9529.86	-4.70	38
76.	View	Ashley Keefer	9516.27	-4.84	55
77.	View	Jason Shaffer	9487.65	-5.12	20
78.	View	Wesley Birrer	9483.96	-5.16	32
79.	View	Matt Borasi	9458.34	-5.42	55
80.	View	Anna Wehr	9413.00	-5.87	42
81.	View	Eric Nakano	9400.19	-6.00	22
82.	View	Matthew DOoge	9398.44	-6.02	33
83.	View	Jarad George	9382.81	-6.17	21
84.	View	Ian Privitt	9371.17	-6.29	10
85.	View	Jen Smit	9348.65	-6.51	24
86.	View	alyssa beatty	9347.01	-6.53	19
87.	View	Jordan Embree	9320.53	-6.79	32
88.	View	Matthew Yunge	9315.69	-6.84	21
89.	View	Jonathan Manzi	9300.21	-7.00	37
90.	View	maninder singh	9291.00	-7.09	118
91.	View	David Umina	9288.12	-7.12	16
92.	View	Heather Rains	9236.87	-7.63	52
93.	View	Elhom Mirmazaheri	9192.27	-8.08	33
94.	View	Brent Hottman	9153.37	-8.47	20
95.	View	Jen Barisone	8906.85	-10.93	74
96.	View	Brittney Heil	8874.16	-11.26	74
97.	View	kevin trommer	8857.42	-11.43	52
98.	View	Brett Armstrong	8788.73	-12.11	25
99.	View	Erik Gregory	8761.83	-12.38	26
100.	View	12 1	8385.14	-16.15	1
101.	View	taylore collie	7714.22	-22.86	124

Tagged as: rankings, stocksquest No Comments

25Apr/071

stocksquest rankings, oh boy!

Contest Rankings
Rank		Name	Total Value	% Gain	# Trades
1.	View	chi	85512.31	755.12	80
2.	View	michael mendoza	24980.30	149.80	39
3.	View	Ben Driscoll	15777.63	57.78	78
4.	View	Bharath Ganesh	14173.78	41.74	31
5.	View	Travis Coots	13645.75	36.46	90
6.	View	Sarah Czarnecki	12799.52	28.00	39
7.	View	john ward	11776.81	17.77	59
8.	View	Bob Wright	11284.24	12.84	17

Tagged as: rankings, Stocks, stocksquest 1 Comment

25Apr/070

stocksquest!

DATE	NAME	PRICE	QTY	DAY CHG	CURR PRICE	SUB TOTAL	GAIN/ LOSS	%GAIN	NOTES
04/17/07	ACCREDITED HOME (LEND)	9.90	5555	0.08	10.94	60771.70	5777.20	10.51	Accredited Home Lenders hires new auditor
02/19/07	BOSTON SCIENTIFIC (BSX)	17.01	1	0.36	15.98	15.98	-1.03	-6.06	stents
03/26/07	CAMBREX CP (CBM)	24.60	1	0.05	25.04	25.04	0.44	1.79	wasting money, yeah...
04/18/07	INTROGEN THERAPE (INGN)	5.16	956	-0.09	5.18	4952.08	19.12	0.39	Introgen Cites Positive Study Results
02/26/07	MUTUAL BEACON FD (BEGRX)	17.47	1	0.11	17.93	17.93	0.46	2.63	berkshire hathaway
04/17/07	NOVACEA, INC. (NOVC)	6.70	2400	0.22	8.22	19728.00	3648.00	22.69	low volume, rather risky
02/19/07	ONYX PHARM INC (ONXX)	27.75	1	0.17	26.73	26.73	-1.02	-3.68	just because
02/26/07	STATS CHIPPAC AD (STTS)	9.38	1	0.01	12.22	12.22	2.84	30.28
02/02/07	SUN MICROSYS INC (SUNW)	6.55	1	0.04	5.93	5.93	-0.62	-9.47
02/15/07	TALX CORP (TALX)	32.05	1	0.55	34.28	34.28	2.23	6.96	equifax attempting to buy talx
02/05/07	VANGUARD INTERNAT (VINEX)	22.06	2	0.27	23.49	46.98	2.86	6.48
Long Portfolio Subtotal								85636.87
Short Portfolio Subtotal								0.00
Cash Account Subtotal								35.68
Portfolio Total								85672.55

Tagged as: Stocks, stocksquest No Comments

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