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How to beat Chartgame.com - A stock simulator program

Chartgame.com, a stock simulator program was mentioned on T2W about
7 or 8 months ago.

The goal of the program as stated on the website is: To help traders to
beat the "buy and hold" strategy.

I'd done fairly well with the game in the first 2 weeks, the rate of the hits
are higher than the misses but in one bad days, I lost the winning position
and in the next few sessions, the loss became so big: Almost $5,500 was
lost while the buy and hold generated $2,200.

I ran away from the website for a about 2 or 3 months. I went back to the
website to verify that the energy (oil exploration stocks) sector was one of
the main cause of my failure. Yes, the record proved that my memory is
correct. I also had a chance to get additional information from the website
where it said:

It's hard to beat buy and hold
The original goal was to have the user beat buy and hold for the whole period
played. However, playing the game, it turned out to be nearly
impossible to beat buy and hold based on that criteria.


I went back to play the game again and the wining ratio this time is even higher,
but one or two times I have made mistakes again and the summary of the
new account surprised me.

It said I had lost about <22%> as compared to a gain of 5.5% for buy and hold. It
appeared that some of my big winning days were not registered due to the
requirement that at least 4 or 5 stocks to be traded for the gain to be registered.
But, I could be wrong on this. I also got a big finding that the thing that hurts the
account the most is when a major reversion happens when I'm still holding a
short position, with that, I now either let my short position lapsed (time-lapse),
or sell it and might buy it the very next day, and it seems to work. I also becomes
more picky and move to the next stock and I did skip a few energy stocks, and after
the next 4 or 5 trading days under the new approach, my overall performance is
$2.64% gain versus 100% loss of capital (this includes the earlier trades
that I mentioned above).

Built up with confidence, I searched through T2W and found TURTrades, the gave
me $100,000 and I finished the first session with a balance of $135,000, for some
reason, the Excel account that I exported the data to only shows a gain of $28,600.

This is something I would like to share with you on how I play the Chartgame.

1/ I use 3-month chart with Candlestick and Bollinger band on the top chart.
2/ The 3 lower charts I rely on:
- Volume
- ADX
- Slow Stochastic


News on the economy, the confidence level affect crude oil price and this would
make the oil stocks move away from the base that it had formed on the last trading
days. I did not do well on IBM and Lexmark. I should have spent time to study
the cause but I did not keep the record of the trading period.

Move to the next chart if the price of the stock makes strange move.

Try for not getting caught in a short position.


I will do more practice on the 2 websites and will see if I can maintain the good
record.


These are the websites:
http://chartgame.com
http://www.turtrades.com/
 
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