Yahoo Investment Challenge - - - A Homework Assignment waiting to happen
Written: Dec 12 '01 (Updated Dec 12 '01)
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Pros: great fun, challenging, learning experience
Cons: none!
The Bottom Line: A great site to compete on, and learn at the same time!
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| three_ster's Full Review: Yahoo's Investment Challenge |
The Yahoo Investment Challenge is basically a game based on investing in the stock market. You are given an amount of money to start out the month, and then you are told that you need to buy stocks, and put them into play. You are competing against other people on the site, and they each have their own stocks. At the end of the month, you win prizes if your stocks have done well, and also you are ranked on the site. I think it is a great, and fun game, but I am going to review this site slightly different. I am going to rate it on its functionality and possible usage in a classroom setting.
What do I think of the site’s contents and functionality?
I think that the site does a great job in showing anything that you might want to learn about a stock’s performance going back as far as you want to see. I was able to take a certain stock (General Mills), and get charts that showed week, month, and even yearly performances and how much that it was returning in each of the instances. I was able to create my own portfolio, and when I did that the site let me enter in the exact amount of money I wanted to spend and what I wanted to spend it on.
What this shows me, is that this site would be a great place for someone to try out the stock market without actually making a purchase yet. By that, I mean that they can test their ideas on the site, and then based on their deductions, they can go on to make their purchase. What the site might do is alleviate some of the stress that the market causes by showing a person just how long the process can be.
There is no limit to the money you place in their, or the amount that you purchase, so it does not matter what your “real” budget is, you can enter in numbers and see what you would potentially make off of any of these types of investments. The site functions great, and I think it would be really nice to use in a class assignment.
How would I envision using this in a classroom assignment or a course project?
The way that I could see this really working out well, is that a class project on the site would allow people to construct more than one portfolio. A class project could be done by having people invest in each of the different markets. By that I mean there could be a technology profile, a metals profile, and even and automobile industry portfolio.
By having such a diverse interaction with the stock market, students could learn a lot from the site. I think it would be cool to see just how well people could do in the many different markets that they could invest in. You could even set it up so that only the NYSE or NASDAQ is used. The site is far more informative than many of the other “fantasy” investing sites, and because of that, I think it holds the potential to be much more influential in the learning process of understanding just how all of the markets work.
If I were in charge of setting up an assignment, I would go with the different portfolios, and only let the students make changes to their portfolio based on research that they turn in to me. That way we can make sure that people are not making impulse buys, and that there is a lot of thought put behind each transaction. However it is decided to run an assignment off of this site, I think that it would be beneficial to anyone using the site because of its informational sources, its vast array of choices, and its user friendliness.
Recommended:
Yes
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