<prompt> Human: Im just lookin for advice. Our group is given 100,000 to work with and so far, we are very confused on which stocks are safe or what works best. The winning groups gets an actual cash prizeEdit: Its not a small class competition for a grade. Its made up of many schools and some colleges in south Texas.  <response>: Ok so the problem with these competitions is that your goal is very different from real life:Real life: Invest smartly, with a good proven average market return minimizing the risk of losing everything and starving or working til you are 80.Virtual Stock Market Games: Winner takes all. There is no downside to losing. You might as well shoot for the moon. You should do things that you would never do in real life, such as invest everything in a few hand-picked start ups, or use leveraged funds. For example SPXL goes up 3 times as much as what the SP 500 does. It also goes down 3 times as much when the SP 500 loses. My personal preference in games like this is to bet against the stock market. Everyone else in your class will be investing in stocks. However, there is about a 48 chance that the stock market goes DOWN over the next few months. If there are 10 other groups in your class all betting on stocks going up, when there is almost a 5050 chance that the stock market goes down over all, it would probably be best to bet that they go down.To do that, purchase a fund like SPXS which goes up 3 times whenever the SP goes down, and vice versa. This is called shorting the market. 