@UofSC Bitshares Competition: Mid-course Update and Early Lessons Learned

We live in interesting times, and one place where that is especially true is in #education and #finance. For those who haven't caught my initial announcement, I've launched Bitshares trading competition in an Intro to Investments course I'm teaching this summer.

Of the 15 students in the course, 11 have chosen to participate and here are the conditions:

-Each student received an initial endowment of 2,425 BTS
-They can trade anything on Bitshares
-The top 5 highest valued accounts at the end of the course receive extra credit

Additional, to spice things up, we've received a generous donation of 10 bitSILVER from @onceuponatime to be distributed to the top 3 winners.

Some Early Lessons Learned

1. Back up your wallet files! We've had students wipe their computers for other reasons and lose their .dat wallet files, not realizing that this would erase their wallets without a backup stored somewhere else.
2. Remember your password. Losing your wallet password is like losing your wallet when it comes to crypto.
3. Some students are diversifying their portfolios across Smartcoins and some assets, while others have concentrated on one or two bigger bets.
4. There's a lot of trading without really knowing what they're trading. For instance, several of the students are trading OBITS mainly because the market exists, but none had learned anything about the underlying asset. I wonder how much this could be generalized to the average retail stock trader?

Less than two weeks to go in the competition. I'll post another update when it concludes and see what kind of feedback the students have to offer.