Looking for a stock market simulation that's as close to the real thing as possible
"There is a site that treats you like a fund manager in the real market, Marketoracy, http://marketocracy.com/. Each user is given 1 million in cash. You can have multiple ""mutual funds"", and the site allows use to choose between two types of strategies, buy/sell, short/cover. Currently, options are not supported. The real value of the site is that users are ranked against each other (of course, you can op out of the rankings). This is really cool because you can determine the real worth of your returns compared to the rest of investors across the site. A couple years back, the top 100 investors were invited to come on as real mutual fund managers - so the competition is legitimate. Take a look at the site, it's definitely worth a try. Were there other great sites you looked at?" "Thinkorswim's ThinkDesktop platform allows you to replay a previous market day if you wish. You can also use paper money in stocks, options, futures, futures options, forex, etc there. I really can't think of any other platform that allows you to dabble around in so many products fictionally. And honestly, if all that ""make[s] the learning experience a bit more complicated"" and demotivates you, well thats probably a good thing for your sake." "Many online brokers have a ""virtual"" or ""paper"" trading feature to them.  You can make trades in near-real time with a fake account balance and it will treat it as though you were making the trade at that time.  No need to manage the math yourself - plus, you can even do more complicated trades (One-Cancels-Other/One-Triggers-Other)." Stock market is like poker: you don't take the same risks when it is fake money and thus you don't learn the same lessons from your mistakes. I would recommend instead to play with real market and real money (rule #0: use only money that you don't need). Start with safe products and go to the bath progressively. It took me about ten years and I am still learning. I have a free account on http://optionshouse.com/ that allows me to invest fake money into different stocks and test their tracking software. It is free and easy to do, just create an account there and they give you $4000 (fake) to invest in the stock market. They do this so that you can test their tracking and other assorted tools, in hopes that you'll choose to invest your real hard earned money with them.
"I am strongly skeptical of this.  In fact, after reading your question, I did the following: I wrote a little program in python that ""simulates"" a stock by flipping a coin. Each time the coin comes up heads, the stock's value grows by 1. Each time the coin comes up tails, the stock's value drops by 1.  I then group, say, 50 of these steps into a ""day"", and for each day I look at opening, closing, maximum and minimum. This is then graphed in a candlestick chart.  Funny enough, those things look exactly like the charts analysts look at. Here are a few examples:    If you want to be a troll, show these to a technical analyst and ask them which of these stocks you should sell short and which of them you should buy. You can try this at home, I posted the code here and it only needs Python with a few extra packages (Numpy and Pylab, should both be in the SciPy package). In reply to a comment from JoeTaxpayer, let me add some more theory to this. My code actually performs a one-dimensional random walk. Now Joe in the comments says that an infinite number of flips should approach the zero line, but that is not exactly correct. In fact, there is a high chance to end up far from the zero line, because the expected distance from the start for a random walk with N steps is sqrt(N).  What does indeed approach the zero line is if you took a bunch of these random walks and then performed the average over those. There is, however, one important aspect in which this random walk differs from the stock market: The random walk can go down as far as it likes, whereas a stock has a bottom below which it cannot fall. Reaching this bottom means the company is bankrupt and gets removed from the market. This means that the total stock market, which we might interpret as a sum of random walks, does indeed have a bias towards upwards movement, since I'm only averaging over those random walks that don't go below a certain threshold. But you can really only benefit from this effect by being broadly diversified." "You can have a look at betabrokers. It's an simulated stock trading platform which is entirely email-based. You start with 10 000$ and you make transactions with commands in the subject line of the email (e.g. ""buy 250$ AAPL"" or ""cover 20 shares of AAPL""). It should be straightforward to add an email interface to your python script." Various companies have hired quants to write algorithms to buy and sell stocks. Each of these has unique criteria that determine when it should buy/sell. Most have some AI component that allows it to tweak parameters and learn. The point is the more people try this kind of fake news tactic the better the algorithms get at responding or not responding to it. Keep in mind though that 1) the AIs learn at different rates 2) if an AI notices a boost in trading volume due to a story it determines is fake, the correct move is to buy and then sell before other AIs catch on. Here are a few things I've already done, and others reading this for their own use may want to try.  It is very easy to find a pattern in any set of data. It is difficult to find a pattern that holds true in different data pulled from the same population.  Using similar logic, don't look for a pattern in the data from the entire population. If you do, you won't have anything to test it against. If you don't have anything to test it against, it is difficult to tell the difference between a pattern that has a cause (and will likely continue) and a pattern that comes from random noise (which has no reason to continue). If you lose money in bad years, that's okay. Just make sure that the gains in good years are collectively greater than the losses in bad years. If you put $10 in and lose 50%, you then need a 100% gain just to get back up to $10.  A Black Swan event (popularized by Nassim Taleb, if memory serves) is something that is unpredictable but will almost certainly happen at some point. For example, a significant natural disaster will almost certainly impact the United States (or any other large country) in the next year or two. However, at the moment we have very little idea what that disaster will be or where it will hit.  By the same token, there will be Black Swan events in the financial market. I do not know what they will be or when they will happen, but I do know that they will happen. When building a system, make sure that it can survive those Black Swan events (stay above the death line, for any fellow Jim Collins fans). Recreate your work from scratch. Going through your work again will make you reevaluate your initial assumptions in the context of the final system. If you can recreate it with a different medium (i.e. paper and pen instead of a computer), this will also help you catch mistakes. "You can think of the situation as a kind of Nash equilibrium.  If ""the market"" values stock based on the value of the company, then from an individual point of view it makes sense to value stock the same way. As an illustration, imagine that stock prices were associated with the amount of precipitation at the company's location, rather than the assets of the company.  In this imaginary stock market, it would not benefit you to buy and sell stock according to the company's value.  Instead, you would profit most from buying and selling according to the weather, like everyone else.  (Whether this system — or the current one — would be stable in the long-term is another matter entirely.)" Coolness - It's not only a matter of staying calm when being up or down. You must keep yourself from chasing a stock that appears to be running away. Or from betting all your money that something(like say a crash) will happen tomorrow because that would be great for you. Use your head not your heart. Empathy - You need to understand what other speculators, investors, institutions and algorithms are going to do when there is a new development or technical signal. And why. For publicly traded corporations, fundamentals and technical indicators only have the value that people(and their algorithms) choose to assign to them at that particular moment. And every stock has a different population trading it. There is no rule of thumb. Patience - To trade successfully, you must avoid trading at all costs. Heh. If you can't find any good trade to do, don't open positions in order to meet your targets, buy a new smartphone, or to fight boredom. Diligence - If your strategy relies on tight stops, don't make exceptions. If your strategy relies on position sizing, don't close when you are a few points down. Luck - In the end almost every trade can turn against you very badly. You must prepare for the worst and hope for the best. You can't buy luck, or get luckier, but you can attempt to stack probabilities: diversify, buy options to insure your positions, reduce holding time, avoid known volatility events, etc. I've never heard of such a thing, but seems like if such a product existed it would be easily manipulated by the big trading firms - simply bet that trading volume will go up, then furiously buy and sell shares yourself to artificially drive up the volume. The fact that it would be so easily manipulated makes me think that no such product exists, but I could be wrong. I've used Wikinvest before and think that's close to what you're looking for - but in Wiki-style rather than forums.  Otherwise, I agree with CrimsonX that The Motley Fool is a good place to check out. Try https://sparkprofit.com/ You practice with real market prices, and it's free. Plus you can get real money pay outs if you do well. I earned 1 cent! hahaha I gave up trying to make money from it, but you get an idea of doing trades and how impossible it is to predict what the price will be. It has some tutorials and helpful things too. Yes, http://shares.telegraph.co.uk/stockscreener/ has what you're looking for. For video games the S&amp;P home entertainment software index will probably work. For airlines there's the S&amp;P airlines index but that may not work well for private jets.  You should browse different S&amp;P indicies based on GICS classifications or any other indicies you may find and then download their returns for the past few years and run a regression analysis on excel. Find the correlation between the indicies and the stock you're looking at then select the index with the highest correlation. "I did once read a book titled ""How I made a million dollars on the stock market"". It sounded realistic enough to be a true story. The author made it clear on the first page that (a) this was due to some exceptional circumstances, (b) that he would never again be able to pull off something like this, and (c) you would never be able to pull of something like this, except with extreme luck.  (The situation was small company A with a majority shareholder, other small company B tries to gain control by buying all the shares, the majority shareholder of A trying to prevent this by buying as many shares as possible, share price shooting up ridiculously, ""smart"" traders selling uncovered shorts to benefit when the price inevitably drops, the book author buying $5,000 worth of shares because they were going up, and then one enormous short squeeze catching out the traders. And he claimed having sold his shares for over a million - before the price dropped back to normal).  Clearly not a matter of ""playing your cards right"", but of having an enormous amount of luck." To be honest, wall street survivor is good but when it comes to learning the stock markets from Europe, Beat wall street is the game to be playing. You can try it out for your self here on http://beatwallstreet.equitygameonline.com/ It is easy to use and there are monthly prizes available to winners, such as Ipads, Iphones and students who play it the game can win internships at top investment banks and brokers I like your enthusiasm and initiative. However, there are a few things you need to consider that you haven't yet thought about. First, it is important to remember that trading with fake money is not the same as trading with real money.  In the fake world, you have $100k.  With this fake money, you can do reckless things with it, such as put it all on one stock.  If you lose, it costs you nothing, so you don't have an emotional attachment to it.  With real money, it will feel different, and that is something you haven't experienced yet. Second, you mentioned that you are good at making picks.  With all due respect, I suggest that you aren't old enough to make that determination.  You haven't been trading for long enough to determine if you are doing well at it.  :)  That having been said, I don't want to completely discourage you from trying something new. Third, you mentioned long-term investing, but you also said that you need to make your money back quick and mentioned trading daily.  Those things aren't really compatible.  I wouldn't consider what you are doing as long-term investing.  With the type of investing you are doing, picking individual stocks and hoping for the value to go up in a relatively short time-frame, it is similar to gambling.  The risk of losing is very much there, and you shouldn't be investing money this way that you aren't prepared to lose.  If you need the money for something soon, don't put it in the stock market. Never forget this.  What can happen is that you start with small amounts of money, do well, and then, thinking that you are good at this, put in larger amounts of money.  You will eventually lose.  If you put in money that you need for something else, you have a problem. If you are trying this out for education and entertainment purposes, that is great.  But when it starts to get serious, make sure that you are aware of the risks.  Educate yourself and be smart. Here is what I would suggest: If you want to try this short-term day-trading type investing, and you understand that the money can easily be lost, I would balance that with investing in a more traditional way: Set aside an amount each month to put in a low-expense index mutual fund.  Doing this will have several benefits for you:  As for your specific questions about stock trading with small amounts: Yes, you can trade with small amounts; however, every time you trade, you will be paying a commission.  Even with a discount broker, if you are trading frequently, the commissions you will be paying will be very significant at the dollar amounts you are talking about.  The only way I can see around this would be to try the Robinhood app, which allows you to trade without paying sales commission.  I have no experience with that app. "There are, in fact, two balances kept for your account by most banks that have to comply with common convenience banking laws.  The first is your actual balance; it is simply the sum total of all deposits and withdrawals that have cleared the account; that is, both your bank and the bank from which the deposit came or to which the payment will go have exchanged necessary proof of authorization from the payor, and have confirmed with each other that the money has actually been debited from the account of the payor, transferred between the banks and credited to the account of the payee.  The second balance is the ""available balance"". This is the actual balance, plus any amount that the bank is ""floating"" you while a deposit clears, minus any amount that the bank has received notice of that you may have just authorized, but for which either full proof of authorization or the definite amount (or both) have not been confirmed. This is what's happening here. Your bank received notice that you intended to pay the train company $X. They put an ""authorization hold"" on that $X, deducting it from your available balance but not your actual balance. The bank then, for whatever reason, declined to process the actual transaction (insufficient funds, suspicion of theft/fraud), but kept the hold in place in case the transaction was re-attempted. Holds for debit purchases usually expire between 1 and 5 days after being placed if the hold is not subsequently ""settled"" by the merchant providing definite proof of amount and authorization before that time. The expiration time mainly depends on the policy of the bank holding your account. Holds can remain in place as long as thirty days for certain accounts or types of payment, again depending on bank policy. In certain circumstances, the bank can remove a hold on request. But it is the bank, and not the merchant, that you must contact to remove a hold or even inquire about one."