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Vietnamese play Wall Street game to teach students

A mock stock exchange organized by a college professor and modeled after Wall Street drew thousands of Vietnamese eager to practice their day-trading techniques in one of the world's last bastions of communism.

Most of the 2,500 participants in the weekend training session in Ho Chi-minh City were college students, but a few were real investors from the city's two-year-old securities exchange, organizer Dao Trung-kien said yesterday.

Kien, a professor of corporate finance at the Ho Chi-minh Economic University, has been organizing market simulations for the past four years to teach his students about the basics of the New York exchange.

This time they were allowed to try their hands at a technique that burned the fingers of many Americans during the dotcom bubble: day trading.

Participants were given US$100,000 in fantasy money to invest in the mock stocks of five companies on Kien's exchange. Computers programmed by software engineering students displayed the gyrations of the imaginary share prices on two giant TV screens, and five simulated brokerages handled the orders of the would-be investors.

Those orders were more frantic than in years past: for the first time there were no limits on buying and selling in a single session, to better simulate the fast pace of trading on Wall Street, Kien said.

"This is a good occasion for the students to practice their stock trading skills, while it's also a good opportunity for real investors to get used to the New York stock exchange model that Vietnam could apply in the future," he said.

Vietnam started economic reforms a decade ago and is moving toward a market-based economy.

"The securities market is now part of our economy, so Vietnamese people are trying to learn about it and trying to invest in it. Maybe in a few years, it will develop more and provide capital for the country," he said. "This gives people a chance to practice what they will do in the future."
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