During these demanding times, schools are looking for new and creative approaches to meet higher education standards while at the same time working within tighter monetary budgets. One of the ways to meet this challenge has been for schools to seek more effective educational tools that will both motivate the students and support educators in building lifetime learning skills.

One of the tools that meet these requirements is the stock market game. These virtual stock games can be offered at all levels and have proven successful with fourth graders on up to college students. Playing the virtual stock market offers teachers an opportunity to enliven core academic subjects, including Social Studies, Math and Language Arts while at the same time providing the fundamentals in investing and saving.

Virtual trading competitions teach and reinforce essential skills in critical thinking and decision making. Students learn to communicate and cooperate and hone their skills in independent research. Using real internet research and news updates can make Internet stock market simulation a true reflection of the real marketplace. By understanding the importance of engaging in stock research before choosing stock, young people can learn to evaluate a stock’s future performance.

While stock market competition creates student excitement, the educational experience is the key ingredient, providing core academic concepts and skills that will help him succeed in the classroom and in life. These educational financial stock games also strengthen a student’s long-term perspective, train him in the importance of diversification and introduce him to the difficulties involved in day trading. Over 15,000 schools in the US currently instruct their students in the use of some sort of stock market game.

Virtual stock trading allows one to trade in a variety of different financial instruments.
In addition to stocks and indexes, one can trade in pink sheet stocks, penny stocks, and mutual funds. Investors with more experience use paper trading to test new and different investment strategies. For example, investors can create several different positions simultaneously to compare the performance and payoff characteristics between multiple strategies. Writing a covered call is technically the same as writing a naked put, but in practice there are subtle differences. With a paper trading account, an investor can set up a bull “credit” spread and a bull “debit” spread simultaneously and analyze the payoff for each position change as the market moves. Investors can “virtually” test advanced strategies without the risk involved in real trading.

Internet stock markets are offered free to internet users and can be played as an individual or in a group. Some virtual trading games can be played 24 hours a day, year-round, even when the real stock markets are closed. Knowing the stock symbols of the company trading in a particular exchange is helpful. Or one can check the stock symbols beforehand on any number of financial websites or financial publications.

David Maxwell is a professional day trader, trading coach and avid investor. He is also the Chief Financial Analyst at Yalicoo, a virtual stock market game website, where users can win real cash money prizes.
For more info on virtual trading visit http://www.yalicoo.com/