Content area
Full Text
Abstract
This paper presents the results of an empirical survey of student's opinion of the "Virtual Stock Exchange" game. 23 out of 48 students enrolled in the Investment Analysis course at the BDIB program completed a questionnaire. The conducted research is a continuation, i.e. an extension of the already existing research that we conduct every few years among students who take the same course in the Croatian program at the Faculty of Economics & Business - Zagreb. The survey questionnaire sought to determine whether participation in virtual trading would stimulate them more for investment research; how much they used what they learned during the semester in the "Virtual Stock Exchange" game; whether they considered the project "Virtual Stock Exchange" useful. The results show that 65.22% of students think that participation in "Virtual Stock Exchange" game is very useful, and 34,78% of them find it useful, 73,91% mark that virtual game considerably stimulated them to study and make additional research of Investment analysis and 69,57% of them used the knowledge acquired on the Investment analysis course in virtual trading. This paper will contribute to the existing literature on the same or similar topic. It is expected that the results of the research will be used to improve the project "Virtual Stock Exchange" and to promote its educational purpose.
Keywords: investment analysis, portfolio, simulation game
JEL classification: G11, G17, G23
Introduction
Active student participation in any virtual stock trading game or simulation adds value to investment education. Universities around the world use a variety of virtual simulation games to bring the real world closer to their students. Some of them are: Wall Street Survivor, MarketWatch, Investopedia Stock Simulator and TD Bank Virtual Stock Market Game (see for details on https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/, https://www.marketwatch.com/games, https://www.investopedia.com/simulator/, https://virtualstockmarket.tdbank.com/).
In the United States, for example, "StockTrak® is the Gold Standard in financial education for over 30 years" (www.stocktrak.com), and the best American universities that use StockTrak, for example, Berkeley, PennState, NYU, UT Dallas have financial labs or trading rooms. Every year StockTrak organizes a competition between universities and, of course, at the end rewards the top 5 finalists (see for details on the website https://content.stocktrak.com/nationalchallenge/).
At the Faculty of Economics - Zagreb investment portfolio simulation game was introduced 15 years ago by...