Surpassing thousands of students all over the world when participating in a virtual securities trading competition, Toan from The Olympia School has become one of 25 excellent students invited to the US to attend the direct transaction round.

The virtual securities trading floor is a playing field set up by Stevens Business School, ranked 77th among the best business schools in the US according to US News & World Report 2023. The participants are students in 10th and 11th grades from all over the world.

Twenty-five excellent traders won the right to attend the third round of the competition. Of these, Toan ranked 6th in achievements with his asset value increasing from $1 million to $7.5 million within one month.

Having passion for learning financial knowledge since he was in eighth grade, Toan began reading information about the impact of the US FED’s policy on global finance. In late December 2023, he registered to attend the competition after hearing about it from a friend.

The competition has three rounds, with 1,200 students registering to attend the first round. The organizing board gives questions about possible situations in the market and competitors have to choose suitable solutions. 

It was not a problem for Toan, who has deep knowledge about stocks by reading newspapers and talking with veteran investors.

After being shortlisted after the first round, Toan and 800 other contestants entered the online transaction round. The organizing board built a virtual securities trading floor using figures of the real market. 

Each competitor was provided $1 million to build an investment portfolio of his or her own. The request was that competitors had to use the $1 million to make investments and raise their assets to the highest possible level.

Toan said he was lucky on the first days because nearly all investment deals brought profits to him. Toan used indicators to analyze and choose investment portfolios, such as RSI (Relative Strength Index), EMA (exponential moving average), Volume (trading volume) and P/E (price to earning ratio).

Toan also made investments based on analyses about listed companies’ real situations and related news.

“I did not buy shares of a meat supply company because I can see the growing trend of vegetarianism. I also did not buy shares that have a high volume in circulation but a low trading volume,” Toan said.

In the second week, he took a significant loss because of unreasonable investment decisions. However, he learned lessons from the errors and changed his strategy, which allowed him to increase his assets to $7.5 million when the trading period finished.

Thuy Nga