Setting Up Your Class – A Guide

Getting Started

If you just registered as a professor, you will be taken directly to the contest creation page directly after registration. If not, you can create your class by clicking “Register New Class” on the main menu under Admin.

To get more information on how to use our Reports and Edit Trading Rules for existing classes Click Here to learn more.

Class Subject

From the dropdown menu, select the subject that best represents your class. Please note that if you would like to include the Budget Game in your class, you will need to select Personal Finance. Click NEXT

Service Level and Class Details

Your service level will determine the maximum length of your class, and the maximum number of trades each student can make. The longer the class, and the more trades allowed, and the higher the cost per student account. If you have a site license, you will not be asked service level. Site license clients have no restrictions on class lengths and no trade caps (although we can add trade limits to your class if you like).

You can add a “Buy and Hold” portfolio to most other service levels for $6 per student account. This allows your students to manage an “active” and “passive” portfolio simultaneously.

• Class Name: this is the name of your class, this is what your students and you will see as your class name. e.g. Fall 2020 – FIN 101 or ECON 450 or Stock Market Enthusiasts
• Number of Students in Class: some instructors organize their students into teams with multiple students on one account. We ask you put the total number of students who will be using the platform, this way we know how many students are engaging with the site.
• Payment Method: if you choose “Instructor” payment type, we will send you an invoice based on your estimated number of students.
  • We will send you two invoices – one immediately after you create your class based on your student estimate, and a second after your trading has begun based on the total number of student accounts that were actually created.
  • Many investment textbooks contain coupons for StockTrak. Your students will enter these coupon codes at registration if you selected Students as the payment method.
• Registration Start/End Dates: these are the dates that your students can register into your class. Outside of these dates, no new students can join (we can change this later if needed).
  • You can set your registration dates independently of your trading dates.
• Trading Start/End Dates: these are the dates that students can actually trade in their portfolios. After the tournament end date, all values are frozen as of the market close on the last trading day, along with the rankings. So students do not need to worry about selling off all their positions at the end.
• Enable Forum: you can turn this on or off at any time, and it appears on your dashboard after logging in. Students can leave comments or questions to the class, and each class has their own forum.

Class Information

• Academic Level: is just for our demographic records for our site usage, select the correct option from the dropdown menu
• Description: will appear when your students register to help them be sure they have the right class, especially if they’re registered to multiple classes at once
• Author of Textbook: determines which coupon codes your students can enter when registering

Portfolio Simulation – Trading Rules

• Currency of Portfolio: this is the currency your students will be trading in, (select from nearly 50 currencies). This cannot be changed later.
• Weekly deposits: a new feature that allows your students to receive “new money” in their accounts at the start of each week. You can turn this on or off at any time. TIP: these deposits can recreate what real investors do each month as they put money aside to invest in their portfolios to save up for retirement or some other large purchase.
• Initial Cash Balance: this is your student’s starting cash, in the currency you chose above
• Minimum Stock Price for Buying: some professors don’t want their students playing with penny stocks, this lets you put a price floor on what the students can buy
• Minimum Price For Short Selling: same as above, but applies to short selling. If you want to disable short selling entirely, that has a separate rule below
• Interest Earned on Cash %: default setting is 3%, which will mean that students will earn 3% by doing nothing with their initial cash. TIP: to encourage them to invest you can decrease this to 1%, or even use negative integers!
• Interest Charged on Loan %: default setting is 8%, and this applies if you enable trading on margin

• Display Alpha/Beta Rankings (or Sharpe Ratio): this is for advanced tournaments, it will allow you to rank your students by risk-adjusted returns. Add risk-adjusted returns to your class rankings, in addition to portfolio return.
  • Alpha/Beta works best for US equity portfolios, since we may not have the Beta available for all international equities or other security types.
• Allow Trading On Margin: this will allow students to trade “On Margin” and borrow money based on their asset value. If students borrow money, they will be charged interest (8% annual interest rate, compounded daily by default, but this can be changed if you ask our support team).
• Pre-Populated Starting Portfolio: if you want to have your students start with the same collection of securities you will need to turn this on and contact our support team at rlogiudice@stocktrak.com with the list of stocks, bonds, mutual funds etc. to be included.
• Allow Short Selling/Day Trading: this will dictate whether or not your students can short sell or day trade respectively. If day trading is disabled, students will not be able to buy and sell the same stock in the same day.
• Make All Portfolios Public: the default is set to “no” to stop students from copying each others investment choices. However, you can make them public if this will benefit the needs of your class.
• Your Professor Account to Appear in Class Rankings: you can turn this on or off at any time. TIP: student engagement increases when they’re competing with their professor.
• Require Students To Make Trade Notes: if enabled students will need to justify each of their trades before executed. TIP: they can be exported along with the historical transactions at the end of the semester to create reports on their investment strategies and how it changed over time.
• Fill Orders on Daily Volume %: this is a liquidity parameter and it compares the quantity your students attempt to trade against the current day’s trading volume of a security in the real world. This comes mostly into play with options trading. With a 200% rule, if a security has a volume of 10, your students can buy or sell up to 20 in one day.
• Limit Number of Trades per Day: by default it’s “no” but you can specify how many trades students can make if you choose “yes”
• Display Badges: students will earn Badges from all actions they perform in the game.
• Display Certifications: upon completing our core curriculum, (if selected from the assignments creation section) your students can earn a certificate in Investing101 – Beginner’s Investing or a Financial Literacy Certification.

Security Types

• Security types: You can choose between equities, mutual funds, options, futures, future options, bonds, and spot contracts (gold, oil, currencies) too. You can also set different commission charges, and the way commissions are charged (per trade, per share, or as a percentage of the total order).

Please note that futures trading is only available to academic customers.

• Commission: You can also set the commission structure independently for each security type (for example, $10 per trade for Stocks, but $0.50 per contract for Options).

• Position Limit: How much a student can invest in one company or ticker symbol based on the current portfolio value. For example, with $100,000 as the initial cash, a 20% position limit will mean students can invest $20,000 in any company/equity/mutual fund etc.
• Diversification: How much a student can invest in one asset class. So if you set this to 50% for equities/stocks, your students will have to either keep the balance of their portfolio in cash, or invest in other security types. TIP: If you have margin trading enabled, you’ll want more than 100% enabled or else they will not be able to

• Allowed Exchanges: This will let you set which countries are available for trading in your contest. US exchanges include United States, AMEX, NASDAQGS and NYSE. This only impacts your equities trading: we currently only support international securities for equities, spots (for currency trading), and futures (mutual funds, bonds, and options are US-only).

You can select all the exchanges, by clicking the button at the top, or individually select any of the available options below. Please contact our support team if you need any assistance at support@stocktrak.com.

Assignments

You also have the option to add an assignment to your class. Assignments are list of tasks you give your students to complete. Your students can see this list and their progress every time they log in, and you can keep track of each student’s progress on every item.

Assignments include things like watching tutorial videos showing how to manage a StockTrak portfolio and how to trade, and placing certain types of orders or making a certain number of trades. If you’re not ready to set-up your assignment right away, you can Skip this Step. We recommend including the beginner lessons for first time investors, and we have more in-depth topics on personal finance, economics, management, marketing and accounting.

To create an assignment after registering your class, click Create/View Assignments under “Admin” on the main menu. This is also where you’ll be able to edit previous assignments and get progress reports on your students’ grades. Also, if you ever want to change any of the trading rules you can click the button below Edit Trading Rules. Another useful page from this dropdown menu is the Reports page, from here you can generate several different reports to track student progress and engagement.

When you are finished, click “Create” at the bottom of the page. Once your class is set up, you can view reports, edit rules, and much more. Click Here to see how.

Class Confirmation

Once you’ve completed all these steps, you’ll be taken to the Confirmation Page. You will also receive a copy of this by email:

This is your Registration Link which you can send to your students, taking them directly to your class registration page. They can also find your class by searching for your class name, but this is the fastest (and most common) way to get your students registered.

You can also set-up a demo account if you’d like to test out your class with a student account. You can use this to trade alongside your students, or to set up benchmark portfolios in the rankings. You can have two demo accounts per class.