Hat tip to Christian for discovering this interactive from Bloomberg that will get those day traders in your classroom excited. 

Here's the game unfolds:

• A stock price chart for an undisclosed company scrolls across the screen for 30 seconds. 
• When you want to buy the stock you hold down the touchpad. You release the touchpad when you want to sell. 
• You have the opportunity to make repeated buy/sell decisions during the course of the 30 seconds. 
• At the conclusion of the game, you discover what the stock you had purchased was, your return from trading the stock, the return of the stock over the period assuming no trades and the return of the S&P 500 over the same time period. 
• You get a different stock every time and a different time period and is quite addictive too:)

Here's an example of the end screen:

Here's a spreadsheet that you could use to have the students collect their results

Have your students play with 10 different stocks and then answer these questions:

• Describe your emotions as you played this game. 
• How many times did you do better then if you just bought and held the stock through the entire time period? 
• How many times did the S&P 500 beat the return of the individual stock? 
• Did you see any patterns in these price charts or did the price movements seem random? 
• After playing this game, do you think you have you have the emotional make-up to to be trading individual stocks? 

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This Stock Trading Game can be good prep before students jump into NGPF's latest investing game, STAX. 

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.

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