If you’ve watched Billions or Industry on HBO and wondered how do I become Axelrod – then wonder no more as there’s an app that can help you learn and invest in the stock market
ShareHub is a new Android and web app developed to improve financial literacy and create interest in the stock market. The cloud-powered platform is a portal for users to acquire knowledge and practice investment on the stock market.
Stock markets are financial markets that bring buyers and sellers together to trade stocks, bonds, currencies and other financial instruments.
The ShareHub portal has three components ranging from playing and learning to investing. For now, the app has the two former components live – the invest component is soon to be rolled out.
The app is pretty intuitive with features already laid out on the first screen. You have access to the three main components – Play, Learn and Invest.
Underneath the components are related icons – The icons for the active components of Play and Learn are the Jikuze quizzes, Wazito Shares Challenge, Market News, and Market Info.
More details can be accessed by clicking on the hamburger menu on the top left.
The play component is based on learning through gaming with the Jikuze quizzes and Wazito Shares Challenge.
The games promise to develop and sharpen your trading experience – a great way to gain necessary skills, take the big step to go live and actually invest in the NSE.
The learning component further helps with confidence-building to start investing. With the market news giving you info to help decide what stocks you should buy or sell. Market info includes the current stock prices, changes, volume of trading, list of companies and how they are performing.
The app is free to download in the Google Play Store, so go ahead and check it out.
To start playing, you should first learn or refresh your investment knowledge with the quizzes – they’re free to play by the way. You can also earn tokens with the quizzes for the other games challenge.
The questions are arranged in levels with 5 questions per level and 10 points per question for a total score of 100%. The questions are random and different each time, so you can take the quiz as many times as you like. You can redo the questions you get wrong.
You get 10 ShareHub tokens for each correct question answered.
These tokens are redeemable for use in the virtual stock market game, the Wazito Shares Challenge.
There are interesting questions revolving around financial market jargon which comes in handy in the Wazito Shares Challenge which is a stock market simulator game. It’s a virtual stock market with virtual companies across various sectors. The game simulates the market by providing opinion articles and press releases that trigger market reactions and stock price changes.
The triggers are randomized but the news alerts and press releases will be displayed in the notification centre inside the app.
Players get to use that info to make buying and selling decisions.
The game will conform to the demand and supply rules.
The virtual stock market has 45 companies spread across various sectors which includes: insurance, FMCG, construction, banking, transport, investment, energy and telecommunication.
There are three levels: beginner, intermediary, and advanced.
Beginner gives you access to 15 companies in the simulated stock market, intermediary and advanced gives you 30 and 45 companies respectively.
The games are set up monthly and you must grow your beginner portfolio to 10% to advance to the next level. You’ll be alerted if you have succeeded. You can purchase more virtual ShareHub tokens to increase your trading capital in the game.
The intermediary level gives you access to various corporate actions such as dividends and IPOs. At this level, you have to grow your portfolio by 15% for two consecutive months to proceed to the next level.
To start playing the Wazito Shares Challenge, you load your ShareHub wallet with Ksh 100 to get 10,000 virtual ShareHub currency.
You will use the virtual funds to buy shares on the virtual market and grow your portfolio. The intermediate level has 20,000 virtual ShareHub tokens and the advanced level has 30,000 virtual ShareHub funds to invest.
The board ranking position will be displayed on the game dashboard and the top players with the top 3 rankings at each level will earn the monetary prize provided by ShareHub nominees.
The advanced level brings in even more corporate actions such as splits, bonus issues, rights issues, scrip dividends and bonds issues. You will learn the benefits of these corporate actions as a shareholder.
The ShareHub app also has a cool Refer-a-Friend option, so you can invite your friends and be rewarded.
The portal is a handy platform to help college students, young or mature professionals and beginner traders who would like to acquire stock market knowledge. It’s a virtual market, a fun, low-risk format for learning before growing into real-time investing.
This is just the start as besides adding the real-time investment component, there are plans to introduce other virtual stock market challenges based on regional and global stock markets. The skills you get become necessary as you advance in the levels and you can actually use them to invest in the NSE or other stock exchanges globally.
The ShareHub app is about making information accessible and easy to understand – especially if you want to try investing but find it confusing to track trends and follow market information.
The ShareHub app will take you on a journey through the stock market and give you the skills and confidence to start investing.
