Viterbo High School

About the Competition

Viterbo University wants local area high school teachers to get involved and start talking Personal Finance to their students. While we have all heard the old adage “a penny is a penny earned”, this days-gone-by saying just doesn’t cut it anymore and our current day high school teachers realize that money management is a learned skill. Knowing this, Viterbo University wants to help shine a light on the need for early financial knowledge to ensure that local area kids get the skills they need to get a jump start on savings and investing.

The Viterbo Cup is a long-running local area Investment Challenge that brings real-world investment tactics and decision making into the classroom.  Teachers, faculty advisors, and students register their teams to use the Charles D. Gelatt Finance Simulation Lab Business Global Portfolio Platform powered by StockTrak, the same software Viterbo finance students use to prepare for careers in business and finance. Students learn basic principles of the stock market, see how various sectors of the economy function, and experience the global economy in real-time with the opportunity to win from a prize pool of up to $500 offered by StockTrak!

How It Works

Students may register directly for the investment competition here [link https://viterbo.stocktrak.com/members/register?admin=2832600&tournament=162561 ], but School faculty advisors may also request classroom visit by Dr. John Robinson (mailto: jfrobinson@viterbo.edu), Viterbo Finance faculty member who will teach investment principles in class and help students with registration and navigating the lab software. Each team will receive $500,000 in virtual US dollars to build a portfolio over the course of the roughly 12 week competition. Portfolio’s will tic up or down in real time and will be visible each and every day . At the conclusion of the competition, awards will be given out to the top five earning portfolios.

Complete competition guidelines can be found here (link to a pdf with the rules below).

Viterbo Cup Fall 2023 Competition Rules:

  1. Trading begins October 3rd and continues through January 3rd
  2. “Short selling” is allowed i.e. you can borrow stocks and then sell them giving you a negative ownership overall
  3. The same stock may not be traded twice in the same day
  4. No stock may be purchased for less than $0.50
  5. Trades carry a $10 charge per transaction, regardless of the number of shares transacted
  6. Only American equities on the following exchanges may be traded:
  7. Cash deposits earn 2.2% per year
  8. Margin accounts charge 8%
  9. Users can trade up to 25% of the daily volume in a stock
  10. Up to 50% of a portfolio can be funded using margin
  11. The final rankings will be based on the sharp ratio which is calculated as: