Welcome to the GoVenture Investment Demonstration! GoVenture Investment is a realistic software simulation designed to help youth and adults learn about personal investment decisions in a fun and educational manner. Let's have a look at GoVenture Investment. All the investment options, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, and gold are simulated. Simulating the investment options offers several benefits for both learners and instructors. First, it offers flexible scheduling. You can start, stop, and resume a simulation at any time and you can complete an entire simulation within a matter of hours rather than over a duration of many weeks. Although you do have the option of doing that as well.
The interface is designed to be easy to use and inviting while avoiding overwhelming the user with too many options, too much research, and so on while still providing a very realistic experience since we can play up to 50 years.
A simulation enables us to experience economic cycles which provides a truer representation of real life investment. We can choose to start a new simulation or resume a simulation that we previously saved. Let’s start a new simulation. In GoVenture Investment we can choose to start a custom simulation where we set up all the trading accounts and all the details. We can also choose a quick-start simulation where we dive into an existing investment experience. The third option is a multi-computer competition. This allows us to connect up to 16 computers together via a local network area network or the internet and compete head-to-head with others. We can actually also compete head-to-head with others on the same computer using a custom simulation btu the multi-computer option allows us to connect computers together so they can all experience the same economic conditions, thereby allowing us to compete with others who may be a different physical location. The multi-computer option will be made available with free upgrades in the future. Check the latest product information for details.
For now let’s choose the custom simulation option. First, we create investors. Investors provide an amount of starting cash, and they can also provide future income, and help simulate the often real world experience that most people have where they may not have a large amount of money to invest right away but maybe save a little bit every month. We can simulate this process by providing a future income level, let’s say 50 dollars and we can choose monthly.
Let’s create Monty as our first investor. We can see Monty’s details below, and we can create Jane as well using the same criteria. We can create up to 50 investors at any one time.
We also have the option for enabling loans. Enabling loans provides the learner with the option of visiting the bank to apply for a loan or mortgage. A mortgage can be used to purchase a real estate property and a personal loan can be used as extra cash for investing purposes.
The second step is to choose if you want to compete against computer traders, for example we can compete against a random investor and market investor and provide them the same or a different amount of investment funds. Random investor makes random decisions with no logic or strategy while market investor strategically follows markets and events.
Step 3 is to choose our time. Time increments can move forward in one week increments, and we can have time move forward automatically after a certain number of seconds have elapsed, or manually at the click of a button. Let’s choose manually. By having time advance automatically it gives us a sense of urgency that exists in the real world. We can also choose to play anywhere up to 50 years. The ability to play up to 50 years enables us to experience various economic cycles which is very helpful in trying to understand how to move money between various investment options.
We can click start to begin the simulation.
This is the main interface for GoVenture Investment. In the upper right is our status window. Here we can see the current date. It is week one, year one. Time advances in one week increments, and we can also see the summary information for each investor playing the simulation. In this case, we’re looking at Monty by clicking the orange drop down box. We can choose to view another investor. It is also important to note that the investor being shown here is the investor that will register any trades that we make throughout the simulation by changing investors using this drop-down box.
We can allow multiple people to play the simulation using the same computer. Below the status window is our advisor window where we can read advice as we play the simulation, and beneath that is our application menu where we can go back to the setup area to say resume or quit a simulation, change the time, access advanced settings, review the help and software user guide or click the performance button for a detailed performance report.
The orange buttons at the bottom allow us to navigate through the simulation, and the blue time advance button allows us to advance time manually by clicking the button. When we begin the simulation we are in the You status area and here we can see our net worth visually broken down into assets minus liabilities, as well as our gain, loss, and ROI (return on investment), and we can also review our portfolio ROI.
Now we move onto investments. Through the details we can see all of the investments we’ve made, and the results of those investments, whether we’ve made money or lost money and so on. We can review liabilities under liabilities. We can review the money we’ve borrowed in terms of mortgages or personal loans and we can visit the borrow area which is the bank to request a loan or mortgage and any time.
Moving on to the investors button we can review the status of all investors and compare performance by net worth gain/loss and return on investment. We can review the network worth chart comparing the performance of all investors and the details for each investor under markets. We can watch television reports about news, and read news articles on economic performance. We can see the investment markets and look at all investments made for each type of investment market.
Let’s move on to the economy. GoVenture investment uses real economic data gathered over the past 50 years in North America. This data is what drives the value of all the investments, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, and old to help the learner understand the direction of the economy for common economic indicators. This includes economic growth inflation.
Unemployment and the prime rate which affects interest rates throughout the simulation and of course we have our investment area. Here we can invest in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, and gold. Let’s have a look at each one more closely starting with stocks. With stocks, we have ten stocks or companies to choose from. Each company represents an different industry segment such as global transportation, biotech, financial services and so on. We can review news and events related to each of the stocks.
We can review the background information on each of the companies behind the stocks including summary paragraphs or detailed listings and background information. We can also view a price chart to see the historical performance of each of the companies and their stock.
To purchase stock we simply choose our action, whether to buy or sell the stock itself and the number of shares we wish to purchase and we can make the trade. We are also charged a broker fee with each trade similarly in the bonds area we can review the various types of bonds that are available including the rating coupon rate, maturity, asking price, and their yield to maturity. We can review news and events related to the bonds and price charts and again to purchase bonds we simply use the action and the bond choice and the number of units we wish to purchase with mutual funds. We can review the various types of you chill funds, this includes bond funds, blend funds, stock index funds, growth funds, and so on. The most common groupings that we see in mutual fund categories and again, we can buy units of each type of fund that we choose with real estate. We can view various properties that are available for sale, some are land some are residences, housing retail, and office buildings and so on. There are only a limited number of properties available so other investors choose to purchase those properties and that limits our choices. We can view the details of each property which includes their zoning, the asking price, the units occupied taxes and so on. We can buy each property if the loan option has been turned on in the simulation. We also provided the opportunity to take out a mortgage on the property.
Finally we have precious metals, in this case gold. And we can purchase gold by the fraction of an ounce and hopefully its price will increase as we move along and time once we’ve made our investments we can review the market information, our performance, and so on and come back and make other investments. We can move our money in and out of each investment option and so on. Finally at any time during the simulation we can visit the performance area. Here we can view a detailed performance report on any investor including the computer traders.
Performance report includes details on the simulation itself, thus as our investor, the investments we’ve made in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, and gold performance on each investment. Our return on investment and overall gain and so on and finally of course our net worth which is used to ultimately determine our performance in the simulation. We can use that net worth total to compare with others and have competitions as well.
This concludes our GoVenture investment demonstration. We hoped you enjoyed it.
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