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Penang Citi Stock Challenge at USM

Well, I had been gone away from school for 2 days to the Universiti Sains Malaysia for attending some sort of workshop and little competiton and it’s the Citi Stock Challenge. 9 students from the Young Enterprise club and I’m part of the 9 went there.

So what is this Citi Stock Challenge is about engaging students into the market trade world, how it works, how to invest, knowledge on stocks and market, etc etc. Basically, it teaches you how to be a broker and eventually run a brokerage firm.

It’s better than going to school as the whole event started at 8.30am which means that I can wake up a bit later than the normal school days. There’s about 20+ schools’ students taking part in this workshop, not everyone get to come, it’s only the chosen one. Hohoho.

The first day was kinda bored, it’s all about listening on the talks, how it works, what is it about, how to run a brokerage firm, it’s like a whole day long lesson in the lecture hall in the university. I know nothing about stocks at first and that’s why I paid my concentration most of the time.

The interesting time comes the next day where the stock market game starts. It’s a non-uniform day where we don’t need to wear our own school uniform instead we actually need to make our own costume or a theme wear or so-called our own brokerage firm uniform.

I am not a girl, I don’t have that kind of mind to think about fancy dresses and so we opt for professionalism look, black polo tee and jeans. =D My friend, Tee Jin and Bernard didn’t have black pole tee and I have to borrow mine to them.

Before the virtual stock market start, we arrived early at the scene to set up our little office that made up of 3 desk. Table cloth, pen holders and stationery were brought. I got no idea how to decorate our office, it’s very simple, neat and tidy with a few oranges on the desk as our company was the Orange Brokerage Firm.

The startup money for our investment business was $1000, in the middle of the games, bonus money were given too for having their own business card, name tags, decorations, costume and blablablabla. We were just hanging a pair of oranges around the neck and we also get the bonus money for costuem. Great right?

There’s several round where we can buy the stocks, each round we were given a set of newspaper articles to read about how’s the market is doing and stuff like that, we will then decide which and what to buy. It’s 3 in a team, or a “firm”, though it’s like we a few teams have already talk and discuss about which and what to buy so all our stocks were like actually almost the same.

We thought that it will have like 8 rounds as the screen showed we got 8 AP headlines of different timeline, though we only 4 rounds. Things got messier as rounds goes on, we got more cash, more stock, more records and paperworks to do and this is where multitasking mind comes in. We buy almost every stocks, didn’t figure about it for long and just buy, buy, buy. Luckily, this buying craziness made us $7540 from the startup money $1000. The most earning team got 8k, and we were the 2nd in the boys team.

When the winner were announced, it says “it’s a team, with colour and it’s a fruit”, I was like OMG, it’s us, it’s us, the Orange Brokerage Firm. Yes it is and at first I thought we wouldn’t make it to the stage because there’s A team that had higher amount of earning than us, but overall we were 2nd for that in the boys group. Who cares which place I get, as long as I get onto the stage, I am already happy about it.

Check out some group photos after the break, click more now.

(Some for Convent Green Lane’s YEs.)

(Chung Ling’s YEs with Mr Bill van Gulik.)

(Chung Ling’s YEs with Ms Lin Dickson.)

(Chung Ling YE’s with Mr Jamal, the runner or helper from Citigroup.)

(Chung Ling YEs and Penang Chinese Girls High’s YEs.)

Yo! More photos are avaible at my flickr.