Win the competition and then say that you saw a flaw in the system but you thought that this flaw was so obvious that you thought that everyone was taking advantage of this flaw but you were doing a better job in taking advantage it. Trading is about flaws in the prices you are trying to take advantage of . (When buying a stok you think that the stock is undrepriced, when selling you see that the stok is overpriced etc) Anyway if you only spotted this flaw you deserve to win , just dont win too big and attract attention . PS what does OP stand for?? Other poster??
True story. My sister was in college and during the course they had a trading contest. She knew I traded stocks. She made her picks and sent me an e -mail with her choices.... She didn't ask me for advice... not yet..I didn't offer any, nor even a comment. (The reason for this is, as part of the course they learned how to evaluate stocks. ) oi vey.... A few weeks later she called me up and asked if I had any hot stock tips cause her stuff was in the crapper.
Did u find some sort of stock rotation in the algorithms they use? if this is for fun, then no big deal. just hope the proffesor doesnt catch on and changr the algorithm causing you massive losses. lol
One time in another life, I worked for a very large computer corporation. And you progressed up the ladder by attending classes and taking tests. I was not the most computer savvy student, but the teacher was a real idiot. He put all the tests and the answers out there on the computer where any inquisitive student could find them. Finally, they confronted me and asked why I always got 100% correct on every test, and I came clean. And the dumbshits even debated for a while if I should be fired for cheating. I finally had to have a private meeting before the supreme head boss to explain why hacking in to the education system was a smart move.
Electronic Data Systems traded on the NYSE under EDS, Ross Perot was the dumbshit than ran it. One time he wanted to build a big data center somewhere, but there was a big coral reef in the way, and he couldn't figure out why they didn't just let him blow the hell out of it with explosives. He actually told me, if we ever have project and some endangered species comes up like that goddamned "snail darter" just kill it.
Not enough info here to make an informed recommendation. Most importantly, is the anomaly something the professor could control? If so, it is at least possible that he intentionally inserted it to see if someone would discover it. You said this was an accounting class, not an investment class. That seems to raise the possiblity of an intentional flaw. Fro me, the relevant question at this point is whether exploiting the anomaly could be considered cheating or not. If it si something available to all participants without taking unusual, ie hacking, means, then it's hard to see how it could be called cheating. In that case, i think I would keep quiet through the end of the contest. I might consider not running up the score, except maybe in the last few days, so as to prevent too much interest in how you're doing it. I certainly would not intentionally run my account down. What if you're wrong about the anomaly and it really was just luck? then you're screwed.
Thanks for the replies everyone. Lots of great points to think about here. First of all, for anyone who is curious, I'm not hacking the site or programmatically manipulating the web-based forms in any way. So I'm definitely not breaking any rules here. However, this type of advantage I have would NEVER show up in a real-life trading platform, and if it did, it wouldn't be there for very long. For arguments sake, if it did show up in real-life, I'd probably still be able to keep my earnings because I'm not violating any terms of service with the "virtual broker" here. For example, if Amazon accidentally misplaced a decimal point on a product and accepted my order & payment, I think they would still be legally required to ship the product to me at a loss. So I think in a real-life trading situation, the broker would have to absorb all the losses incurred from their platform malfunction. I can't tell if some people are being sarcastic or sincere when they tell me not to do it, simply because cheating is wrong. As if any advantage over the general public is always a bad thing. I do agree though that I'm not learning anything new now. I was learning a lot in the beginning, but now it's just too too easy to make money. Actually, for the last few days, rather than trying to trade as best I possibly can, I'm spending more time trying to come up with a believable trading log, haha. So I'm not sure the best way to handle that aspect, of not learning anything new. I might just intentionally drop my account from 1st place to last place, just so I can experience what it's like to have everyone laugh at me and lecture me about how "Buy and Hold" is the only "true" investment strategy. That would probably be a good learning experience. I think only one person specifically mentioned it so far, and I think tact is the main concern here. I don't care about ethics/morality or Ethics/Morality in any pure or supernatural sense. But I do care about unnecessarily angering other people where they may feel betrayed or manipulated by me in some way. I mean, I don't want to be vilified by the instructor or the rest of the class, since I think almost everyone else (including my instructor and even one of the deans of the college) are playing the game with a "Buy&Hold" mutual fund mindset, where only a few in the game are day trading. But then again, becoming the villain may be an interesting learning experience too. What would Batman do?... Like other people have already suggested, when asked, I think I'll just say I found a system inefficiency, and that I'm quietly exploiting it until it gets plugged up by the sim developers. But I won't reveal what it is until the contest is over. I'll try to be tactful so the instructor frames the situation more like "hey! my students beat the S&P!" rather than "hey! my students are a bunch of cheaters!" But if I still end up getting labeled as the "bad guy" here (and banned from trading any more in the contest), then I'll just keep the actual details of the exploit to myself.