Help please.

I think you are asking the wrong question. The question you should be asking is how to win a stock picking game!

Remember the key principals of modern portfolio management is that risk and reward fall along a sloping line. While it’s possible to find opportunities that present a higher reward than the risk they present relative to the market these opportunities get cannibalized quickly. As such, the best way to get a high return on your fictional portfolio is to take on a lot of risk!

While in real life most wouldn’t do this because they would be afraid of losing their hard earned money, you lose virtually nothing by tanking a virtual portfolio (so the risk of the stocks may be high but the risk to your wealth is low). On the return side you have the potential for all of the accolades and potential prizes that come with winning which is similar to the upside of the actual underlying equities.

Here you have a situation where the derivative portfolio you are trading (your contest paper money) has the same upside but a lower down side than the underlying assets (the money you would lose if the real securities tanked). The way you play this is by taking on lots of risk!

You have not gone into the types of securities you can trade but from what I’ve seen in these people usually do well buying leveraged assets (a way to increase your risk and return pro-rata). Examples of these are the double VIX (TVIX) if you want to bet on volatility the next day or levered ETFs up to 3X (http://etf.stock-encyclopedia.com/category/leveraged-etfs.html) if you want to bet on the market (or a sector) moving one way or another the next day. The easy way to do this of course if to buy stocks that you think could move the next day because they have been down for a while or they just went down the prior day. A shorting strategy (ie. buying puts) can work if you think a stock will go down the next day for the opposite reasons.

In summary, you can win a stock picking game with leverage and risk! (Don’t try this with your own portfolio or you’ll end up dealing with what these guys dealt with (http://www.bestbooksontrading.com/2011/08/quants.html)!

Education is the key ingredient. Read all you can get your hands on about investing and the stock market. Knowledge is power, so become an educated invest before making your first buy.

You could start here: www.investopedia.com

I recommend a starter book called “The only investment guide you’ll ever need” by Andrew Tobias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Only_Investment_Guide_You%27ll_Ever_Need

If you want to become a member, this is another good Organization to learn from: www.betterinvesting.org

Your next task is to figure out 4 things.

The amount of risk you’re willing to take?
No risk, Low risk, Medium risk
You get the picture.

What kind of investor do you want to be?
Saver, Speculator or Specialist

How long to want to invest?
Day trader, Short term, Long term or Life long

What do you want to invest in?
Stocks, Bonds, Coins, Precious metals, Money Market, Real Estate,Etc.

There are different styles of investing so learn them all and then pick the one that suits your risk tolerance and tastes.

I chose to be a Dividend Investor. I do reinvest my dividends and that buys me more stock. Since I’m in it for a life time I do not let the roller coaster ride of the stock market influence my decision to sell. I have set up an excel spread sheet of stocks that I have considered to buy and loaded them on to a portfolio on yahoo finance. When I copy and paste the current prices into spread sheet my excel spread sheet tell me when to buy, hold, or sell. It does this by the criteria that I set up in the formulas I created in my spread sheet. I research all the companies before they go my spread sheet.

My real brokerage is Schwab. I don’t use the virtual trading platforms for real trading because I already had a real brokerage account before I learned about virtual trading.