Getting Started: Trading

Making a trade at Wall Street Survivor™ is simple – follow these steps:

Step One: Choose the stock you want to trade.

If you need help picking stocks, there are a few options available to you. You can visit our Trading Tips page or our Market Summary page. There, you will be able to find many popular, and not so popular, stocks to trade.

Step Two: Determine the Ticker Symbol of the Stock You Want to Trade

Every company listed on a public exchange has a ticker symbol, which is a 1 to 5 letter code for each publicly traded stock. To look up a ticker symbol, click on the SYMBOL LOOKUP link on the trading page and enter the company name. If the company is publicly traded it should be found. If the company is not found, then it is probably not a company that trades publicly. For example, Google’s ticker symbol is ‘GOOG’ and The Coca-Cola Company’s ticker symbol is 'KO'.

Step Three: Determine the Order Type

When it comes to selecting the order type, you have 4 options. You can buy, sell, sell short, and cover stocks.

Buying stocks is pretty straightforward. If you think a stock price is going to increase, then you should buy the stock. All you need is available funds in your WSS.
Selling stocks is easy. If you own a stock that has gone up and you want to take your profits, or you have a stock that you are afraid is going to fall, then you should sell it. In order to sell stocks, you must first own them. After all, you can only sell something you own, right? Wrong!
Shorting stocks is a little more difficult to understand. Everyone knows that to make money in the stock market all you have to do is ‘buy low and sell high’. But you can also make money in a declining stock market by ‘selling high and buying low.’ By ‘shorting’ a stock, you are actually borrowing the shares from your broker and selling them, but then you have a liability to buy the shares back at some point and return the shares to your broker to pay off the loan of shares. So if you short a stock, you are really hoping for the stock to lose value after you’ve shorted it.
For example if XYZ stock is trading at $30 and you think it will decrease in value, you should ‘short’ sell it. By ‘shorting’ the stock, you sell it for $30/share (without having paid for it yourself). If you are correct, and the price of XYZ stock falls to, say, $25, you can then buy it back a $25/share - making a cool $5/share. That is, you sold the stock for $30/share, and you only paid $25/share for it, even though you sold it before you paid for it. Shorting stocks allows you to make money on a stock when it falls in value.
Covering a short sell is how you close out your short position. If you have ‘shorted’ a stock, and you want to take your profit (or loss, as the case may be) by closing your position, you will want to select the ‘Cover’ option in the ‘Order Type’ pull down box. So, in the example above, if you wanted to reap your $5/share profit by closing your position, instead of selecting the ‘sell’ order type, you will want to select the ‘Cover’ order type.

Step Four: Determine the Number of Shares you want to Trade

In theory, you can trade anywhere from one share of stock to many thousands or millions of shares. In reality, there are several factors which determine how many shares you can purchase. A few of these factors apply to both Wall Street Survivor™ and the real-world markets; other factors apply only to Wall Street Survivor™.

Buying Power: The first factor which determines how many shares you can purchase is the amount of money you have, plus the amount of margin (money you borrow from us), which collectively make up your buying power. So, if you have $100,000, and you have a margin account from which you can borrow an additional $50,000, your total buying power is $150,000. If you are interested in buying stocks which are priced at $1/stock, you can afford to buy 150,000 shares (the number will be slightly less because there is a brokerage fee of $10 WSS Bucks per trade. If the stock is trading at $30/share, you can afford to purchase slightly less (again, due to the WSS brokerage fee) then 5000 shares.
Volume: In Wall Street Survivor™, we only allow you to trade a certain percentage of the actual volume traded in the real world. Please see the Tournament Trading Rules for the specifics on your tournament.

Step Five: Determine the Price Type, the Price, and the Term

Before you can place your order, you need to understand the different orders types:

Market Order: A market order is an order that when placed is sent immediately to the market and gets filled at the next available price.
Limit Order: A limit order is an order where you specify that you will pay up to a certain price for a buy, or you want at least a certain price to sell. So if XYZ company is trading at $40.25, you can place a limit buy at $40.00 and hope to purchase XYZ if it drops. Once you purchase it, you could then place a limit sell at $45.00 and the stock will sell once the price gets up to or over $45.00
Stop Order: The most popular stop order is a stop sell (also called a stoploss). If you did purchase XYZ for $40.00 and want to make sure you don’t lose too much on that trade, you could place a stop at $39. That way, if the stock started falling, you would sell out and cut your losses. Another way to use the stop order is to lock in a profit. If you bought XYZ at $40.00 and it moves up to $43.00, you could place a stop sell at $42.00 and that way if the stock did start falling you could lock in your $2.00 profit.

The Term of an order is simply how long you want your order to be open for. A day order will expire at the close of the business day. A good-til-cancel (GTC) will remain in effect until you cancel it.

Trading is that easy, so start your portfolio today. And remember, this is just play money, so don’t be afraid to try new things!