iGame-2010 is over!

Posted on Tue, 04/06/2010 - 21:48 | by The Insider

The Investment Game ’10 has ended. It definitely hasn’t been an easy task to organize and to run the game, as we, the board of the Investment Fund, faced many challenges starting from fund raising and ending with programming. But, in the end, the game turned out to be rather successful, as the players were trading with never seen before enthusiasm to fight their way to the top. In this article we will provide a couple of insights on how it all happened.

The organizational side was problematic yet solvable and challenging yet rewarding. With the financial assistance of our sponsors, NASDAQ OMX Riga and Pivot Capital Management, and the helping hand and sincere devotion of so many people we managed to overcome all the obstacles.

We also have to thank our fellow Year 1 students for their essential help in promoting the Investment Game. Before the official start of the game schools and universities around the Baltics were marked with the Investment Game’10 posters. Moreover, forums and Facebook pages were flooded with invitations to participate in the game (even a few bans could not stop the stream of promotion). Media coverage in the Baltics was ensured by NASDAQ OMX Riga, Delfi, Traders.lt, and MarketNews. Therefore, when only a few seconds were left before the first orders, the board of iFund was calm. We only needed to set-up data feed, update the news, and upload weekly market overviews.

However, when the game had started, the initial calmness vanished quickly. Instead of seeing the stock market data running smoothly from our three data providers to the iGame server, there were certain complications with collecting data, and an interim station was needed to ensure that the markets actually worked. So for the first week a simple Acer laptop with SSE Riga Internet became a super-risky game server, and instead of “Hello” we started each and every day with, “Is everything okay with the data?” In addition, some programming skills were crucial for renewing all the tickers and keeping track of gazillions of numbers and codes,. Thus, the Chief Investment Game Organizer Dmitrijs became a full-time programmer for the first week’s nighttime. Although some interruptions in the data feed were inevitable, all the problems were eventually solved.

It was worrying and at the same time extremely entertaining to watch Dmitrijs anxiously calling the data providers, programmers and all the iFund board members around 20 times a day (at any time of the day – early in the morning or late at night) to get all the problems solved. As entertaining as it was, although some of the problems were inevitable and unexpected, the amazing thing was that he always got them solved in the shortest time possible.

Another extremely important issue was publishing market overviews. Luckily, with a sincere contribution from market overview teams, participants of the game were able to enjoy high-quality overviews of all markets present in the game. Also, this year the overviews section was complemented with stock picks that were positively welcomed by participants of the game. The idea was simple: each week there would be buy recommendations for one or two stocks for each market provided by a special team of Y1s. A couple of words should also be said about the game’s participants. Overall, there were 4500 players this year. Even though the number of players was smaller than last year, they were much more active – they spent more time in the game and made more orders than last year. Another interesting fact is that, unlike previous years, when Lithuanians represented the majority of players, Latvians were more active this year. We were also happy to see promotion in Sweden and Finland work out, as we saw quite a large number of Swedes and Finns playing the game.

It was also interesting to see the Estonian market being the most popular market throughout the whole game. This was due to the spectacular performance of the Tallinn Stock Exchange in January.So this is pretty much all about the Investment Game ‘10. The closing ceremony will take place at the end of March, where we will award the game’s winners and the best Market Overview teams. It has been fun for us to organize the game, and we hope that the participants have enjoyed the game and have gained experience in trading and financial markets in general. We look forward to the next year’s Investment Game!