NEW YORK (Commodity Online): The NYSE barely finished in the black for 2011. The Standard & Poor 500 ended the year with a 0.3% gain and the Dow Jones Industrial average finishing up 6%. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the rest of the world, with major European and Asian indexes plummeting by double-digit percentages.
2011 proved to be a volatile year in trading, a sentiment echoed by many of the users at the popular stock market game, WallStreetSurvivor.com. User dtrader9 originally signed up for the stock market game as a way to learn about day trading. “I’m glad I signed up when I did,” he writes. “This year’s events caused the markets to swing back and forth hugely. If I had been trading real money, I could have lost a lot.”
And he wasn’t the only trader feeling that way. With a year that saw major events like the sovereign debt crisis in Euro Zone countries, the Occupy Wall Street movement and the death of Steve Jobs, uncertainty made traders hesitant and cautious.
And things are not looking much different for next year. The Euro crisis has not been resolved and the politics of the United States will make things uncertain, since it is an election year. So which stocks are virtual stock exchange users looking to in the coming year?
“I’m looking at Abbot Laboratories (ABT),” stock market game user sparticus989 writes. “They have paid dividends every year since 1971 and are looking at a sales increase in the next year. They are one to watch.”
“I lost a lot of money with Netflix, Inc (NFLX) in 2011,” dtrader9 says. Rising prices and other poor business decisions cost them this past year. “I’m going to play it more conservatively in 2012 and just keep testing out new trading strategies on the virtual stock market.”
