About us
The Next Generation Investors (NGI) competition was initiated by Natalia Buchajska, a Polish high school student and aspiring investor. Our team decided to organize a competition that promotes investing and learning about the stock-market. We believe that this is particularly important in the face of the current financial landscape, with the Covid-19 pandemic and investment anomalies such as GameStop. Moreover, the competition aims to help young investors make connections with their counterparts across the world. Any student who is currently attending middle school or high school is invited to participate in the competition, no matter their skills or knowledge level in investing and financial markets.
Our competition focuses on strategic investing, whether that be value, growth, impact or any other investment strategy. However, we would like to avoid purely speculative investing. In order to enforce this aim, the virtual investment platform allows for diverse types of trades: buying, selling, short selling, margin selling, and partial shares purchases. It also allows for different types of orders, such as limit orders and stop losses. Symbols available for players will be traded indexes (S&P 500, Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and Nasdaq 2000), traded exchanges (AMEX, Nasdaq, NYSE, and OTC-BB), and traded securities (Public companies, funds and ETFs). Thus, despite the current growing popularity of cryptocurrencies, we have decided not to include them as an option. Our focus can also be seen by the length of the competition - 3 months - which will allow for long-term growth. We hope that the competition’s timeframe in the summer months will also provide participants with the time to complete stock-market analyses.
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In order to promote our aim of spreading investing knowledge, we have decided to ask each participant to submit a 100 to 300 word description of their investing strategy at the end of the competition (find out more in the rules). Moreover, we have chosen to conduct the competition on the MarketWatch Virtual Stock Exchange, because its MarketWatch website provides free and comprehensive articles on investing and current economic events.
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In order to meet our second aim of building global connections we have once again opted for the MarketWatch Virtual Stock Exchange because of its "discuss" page, where all participants will have access to a forum where they will be able to share their thoughts and get to know one another. We have made social media pages for the competition to allow for greater communication between participants. Players can participate in polls, live stories, discussion posts and other events. Additionally, in the middle and at the end of the competition, we will ask for the winning players to share their strategies and thoughts through interviews posted to our social media platforms. This will allow players to learn from one another and build world-wide connections.
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Finally, as we would like as many students to participate as possible, we have decided to provide prizes. Please find out more information regarding prizes in the Rules page.
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For everyone participating, we wish you the best of luck and hope you enjoy our friendly competition!