Welcome to the web's only dynamic, interactive stock market simulation, simCEO - where students create their own companies, research each others' companies, and trade shares to influence prices. This demo is written for instructors and students to highlight the unique opportunities that this simulation offers and provide an overview of how it all works.
What makes us so unique? A quick look at the chart below offers a good start.
| simCEO | Other Stock Market Simulations |
|---|---|
| Objectives: business and investing skills, as participants create a business, research, and manage a portfolio by buying/selling shares and utilizing banking options. | Objective: investing skills as participants use hypothetical dollars to invest in real companies |
| Use pre-set or customized assignments to have participants research about business and investing components at their level of understanding. | 1) To value companies, students must know terminology and complex ratios. 2) Participants must "outsmart" actual investors and analysts. |
| Companies begin evenly valued at $20.00 | Companies already fairly valued (according to their current share price). |
| Stock trading, deposits and loans are possible. | Students (generally) can only trade. |
| Trades influence the price of the companies. | Trades do not affect prices. |
| Instructor sets the simulation's environment and dictates changes in news and prices. | The environment of the simulation is fixed. |
| Relevant feedback: Work is evaluated by instructor, peers, and the public. | Limited feedback, work (if any) is handed into instructor only. |
| Encourages a long-term investment approach | To "win", investors must gamble to make significant gains in a short period of time. |
| Participants must create a business to thrive in a specific environment. | Participants do not create. Companies already exist. |
| Instructor flexibility: set the groups for each simulation, set the start and stop dates, create news that affects the simulation, customize assignments | Instructor has limited flexibility and interaction |
Our desire to create this simulation actually started after we realized several shortcomings in existing stock market simulations in which students research and buy imaginary shares of actual companies.
| Limitations of Other Simulations | simCEO Solutions |
|---|---|
| Do students really understand the companies in which they are investing? Or, are they simply investing in popular companies? | Students CREATE the companies and therefore can better evaluate the business idea. |
| Is this a fair expectation of what we expect students to be able to do? If the market determines a “correct price” for each company, then traditional simulations are actually asking students to not only evaluate companies, but evaluate them versus the public’s perception (current share price) of this company. | Companies all start at $20.00 so students can first evaluate companies (which start evenly valued) and then assess how much they would be willing to pay for a share. |
| How much time should we ask students to devote to learning about the basics of investing? Everyone has a difficult time determining stock selection (including professional analysts!). To be successful requires a significant amount of time analyzing what can be an almost endless stream of data. | With due diligence researching, students have a strong chance of evaluating companies successfully by devoting a reasonable amount of time to the process. |
| Simulations with fictional shares encourage high risk transactions (in order to win) due to the short timeframe of the simulation. | The suggested timeframe is twenty years (of fictional time) allowing students to focus their energies on finding successful companies instead of quick trading. |
Now that you can see the unique opportunities, find out how all of it works!
The table of contents on the left of this page should allow you to easily navigate through this portion of the website.
Click on any section you wish to explore, or simply follow the arrows at the bottom of each page to take a progressional approach through the tutorial.
Note that parts of this demo that are written primarily for instructors.