ICICIdirect Centre for Financial Learning (ICFL) has launched the fourth season of virtual stock market competition for college students - StockMIND.
Last year, the competition saw more than one lakh participants from over 620 colleges including many premium management, graduate and engineering colleges across the country.
This year's StockMIND is launched with a range of new features. Since the objective of the game is to help students understand the equity markets, the whole competition will be played with virtual money on a proprietary platform developed by ICFL called Virtual Stocks. Each participant has the opportunity to invest ₹15 lakh of virtual money on the Virtual Stocks platform.
The competition, this year, also provides an opportunity to trade in derivatives apart from equity by participating in the optional derivative accelerator. The winner of the derivative round from each college gets a wild card entry into finale.
This year the winner from every college will participate in the national round and the winner of national round will bag ₹1 lakh. The first runner-up and second runner-up would receive a cash prize of ₹50,000 and ₹25000 respectively.
StockMIND will be held in two stages - postgraduate students will participate in StockMIND, the graduate students will participate in StockMIND Grads. The college of the national winner for both the categories will receive a rolling trophy.
To encourage participation from women students, there are special rewards for women at every stage and also the winner in the female category gets a cash prize of ₹5000 in the national round.