How Do DIYSE Contests Work?

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In our contests, you are given a notional investment budget that you allocate across a portfolio of stocks to try to achieve the highest returns during the contest period. No shares of stock are actually bought or sold, but our software tracks the performance your portfolio would have achieved, ranks your performance against the other competitors, and (if you did well) awards you the cash prize corresponding to your ranking.

Because no shares actually trade hands, you might think that securities regulators wouldn’t care about stock picking contests, but you would be very wrong. Because our contests provide for the exchange of contingent payments based on the value of U.S. securities without conveying ownership in the underlying securities, they are still considered to be regulated financial instruments.

In order to legally offer these stock picking contests for real money, we are required to make sure every contest portfolio meets very specific rules on diversification and trading volume. If you’re interested in seeing those rules, you can find them here.

Fortunately, our patent-pending software makes building compliant portfolios easy, and we offer a choice of portfolio construction templates that enable you to optimize your chance of winning given whatever set of stocks you think will outperform over the contest period.