Stock Market Game – Yalicoo
Summarizing the quarter and starting new competitions

By Yinon Arieli | October 1, 2007

Three months of excitements in the quarterly competition ended last Friday. The grand winner of this quarter was TheTrader with an incredible return of 22.4%, more than 6 times higher than the 3.6% return of the NASDAQ. TheTrader took the lead from the start and kept on leading almost all the way. Along the course of the competition TheTrader also won few of the daily games. Nivster and ChrisMartin did not manage to catch up to TheTrader, but their portfolios still ended showing impressive returns of 15.7% and 15% respectively.

It is interesting and quite amazing that more than 50% of Yalicoo’s traders in the quarterly game managed to overcome the approximate 3.6% increase in the NASDAQ index last month. These traders seem to be familiar with the myriad of stocks in the NASDAQ and chose those which yielded highest returns. I have also noticed that few players ended the competition with negative returns. It is important to remember that Yalicoo offers you an unusual feature- it allows you to reset your portfolio once at each competition. In this case, all of your holdings are deleted and your return is reset to 0%. This can be done by clicking on the “Reset my portfolio” link placed in your portfolio. Keep this in mind. This tool, while clearly not available when you invest real money, enables you to learn from your mistakes and attempt to correct them.

The monthly competition was also over last week. kdiddy, who joined the game only two weeks ago and lead the competition since then, won with an impressing portfolio return of 10.9%. After many rotations in the leading positions on the score board, the second and third places were won by Slowhand and burntles with returns of 8.6% and 8.1%, respectively.

A new beginning…

Once in every quarter we have a special day. On this day all the competitions starts over. Well, today is the day, as four new competitions are about to start - the quarterly, the monthly, the weekly, and also the daily competition.

As the market changed its trend recently and started to increase, this could be an excellent entrance point for well-informed and knowledgeable traders. Joining the continuous competitions such as the quarterly and the monthly at this point can assist early comers to invest wisely and create a lead over late joining competitors. In any case, get ready for another exciting three months of Yalicoo competitions!

Last week stock market highlight - China’s mobile companies surged on speculation regarding telecom restructuring

A predicted restructuring in China's telecommunications industry may widen the access to mobile phone market. The speculations suggest that the Chinese government will restructure the industry and issue licenses that will allow land carriers to start offering wireless service. If these speculations are correct, Chinese wireless value-added service providers will be the large beneficiaries.

Investors assume that new telecommunication companies such as China Telecom Corp. and China Netcom Corp. will turn to companies among which will be Linktone, Hurray and Kongzhong to provide cell phone content like games and ring tones to their customers. Shares of those companies soared on heavy trading last week, mainly on during the Thursday session, gaining tens of percentages over their previous price.

Some of the Chinese analysts say it is too early to tell what will happen in the future, as they think the government will not issue any new licenses for new wireless services at least until the end of the Beijing Olympics, which will take place in August of 2008. Moreover, it is possible that new wireless service providers could also opt to develop the content in-house as well.

This is another example suggesting that the Chinese market is developing but these expectations are still based on a grain of speculation. Some of those companies, such as Baidu (BIDU), CDC CORPORATION (CHINA) and others, can be traded in Yalicoo possibly yielding high returns. It will be interesting to find out if Yalicoo traders will choose to invest in those stocks and if yes, based on what news.