The total number of pages should be 5. Be careful, graphs or
tables can be very important and useful, but it doesn’t count in term of space
taken in the paper. The paper is a report about my trading activities in the
Virtual Trading Competition (MarketWatch) that started on the first of March.
The objective is to select securities but also to see how the prices evolve and
how I reacted.
Show on graphs when and at what price you traded your
securities. You can use stockcharts for that purpose. With the charts, it will
be more than 5 pages but the idea is the following: you must write 5 pages but
you should add graphs (that don’t count as writing)
Context: I bought the following 4 stocks on the first of March
and I will not sell them until after the trading competition ends. We had 1 Mio
in virtual cash:
1) FB (Holdings:
25% Price: $213.46 (-1.47%) Value: $285,182.56 (13.63%))
2) JPM (Holdings:
23% Price: $139.78 (-1.99%) Value: $254,399.60 (9.80%))
3) MSFT (Holdings:
24% Price: $299.49 (-1.50%) Value: $271,637.43 (7.73%))
4) TSLA (Holdings:
28% Price: $999.11 (0.52%) Value: $311,722.32 (25.60%))
Overall
Return: 12.31% ($123,061.64) Ranking: 5 out of 100 players
The paper should be about:
i/ your analysis: which securities you selected and why
ii/ what strategies you adopted
iii/ how successful your strategies were, and how did you
adapt if you had to.
There are many different methodologies you can use. It
depends on your trading experience. It could be about:
i/ fundamental analysis
ii/ your observation on the relationship between different
markets, global macro strategies
iii/ the relationship between business cycle and financial
markets
iv/ relationship between events and evolution of prices in
financial markets
v/ relationship between political or geopolitical situations
and financial markets
vi/ quantitative approaches you developed
vii/ specific firms, industries, financial instruments
related to your trading.
viii/ technical analysis
etc.
Each part of the paper should have a title so it can be read
clearly.
The introduction should be something like half a page. It
includes a general introduction of the topic, the more specific question that
you want to answer, the brief description of the different parts that you are
going to develop.
Each part should be composed of clear sub-parts, clearly
separated in paragraphs. You have to be able to construct those parts in a way
that you don’t have more than 5 or 6 big paragraphs, and themselves shouldn’t
have more than 3 or 4 subparts.
The conclusion is a brief summary of your paper (half a
page) emphasizing on the main point. You can also mention questions that arise
from the analysis you did, or potential need for reflection on some parts.
In the reference part, you have to mention your sources.
Direct quotes are not allowed.
