The ultimate guide to stock market simulators and virtual trading

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Stock market simulators are a great way to get a feel for what it’s really like to trade stocks, whether you want to do that as a full-time job or as a hobby. You can get into virtual trading for free and not risk losing any money, but the real appeal is often the ability to simply track your progress, keep up with some of your favorite stocks and dream a little bit about making outsized returns on your mock portfolio.

Stock simulators come in two main types:

• Stock market games, where you compete with friends or strangers to pick the top-performing stocks while managing a portfolio. The emphasis is less on trading and more on buy-and-hold investing over the life of the game. Mostly, you’re just there to have fun.
• Virtual trading, where you’re tracking the market closely and actively trading stocks for virtual profit. These simulators typically use a broker’s actual trading platform and get you comfortable with the various tools that are available. For the most part in virtual trading, you’re using it as a way to practice real trading and test-drive a platform.

These simulators let you trade stock as well as the best exchange-traded funds, and some even let you trade futures and other products.

Here are several of the top stock market games and virtual trading platforms available online for those who are interested in getting started.

Top stock market games

Wall Street Survivor

Wall Street Survivor is a popular stock market game that allows users to join existing contests and compete for cash prizes, or create a new game to compete against friends. You’ll be given $100,000 in virtual money to trade with and practice your investing skills.

You’ll also have access to 30 free courses the site offers to help you build your financial knowledge. You’ll be able to learn about topics like socially responsible investing, how to value a business and introductions to financial statement analysis. These courses can be especially helpful if you’re just starting out in investing.

Virtual Stock Exchange

Virtual Stock Exchange is offered by MarketWatch, and it allows you to create your own games or you can join one of the tens of thousands of games that are currently in play. If you’re designing your own game, you can set whether players can trade on margin or short-sell stocks, how long the game lasts and how much virtual money players begin the game with.

You can buy stocks traded on American exchanges, and you simply have to type in the ticker symbol to get full details on the company. Players have a page devoted to their portfolio, and they can set up a watchlist to track stocks for later research. This portfolio-building competition is a solid addition to the field.

Motley Fool CAPS

The Motley Fool was founded on the principle of crowd-sourced investment wisdom, and its CAPS service does much the same, allowing you to see why a player has made a pick. Players can write a short pitch for any given stock, and these can be a great tool for sourcing ideas. When you join, you’ll be thrown into a giant game with tens of thousands of players, and each entry is ranked according to their performance. Looking for a great stock idea? See what the leaders are buying and why.

CAPS tracks your performance over time, giving you a score based on how well you do relative to other players in the game. It’s not about making money so much as about earning points based on whether your pick is right and by how much it beats the stock market overall. But the real value is watching top performers in action and even asking them questions.

HowTheMarketWorks

HowTheMarketWorks is a great option for those just starting their investing journey and is particularly geared toward students and investment clubs. The website targets high school and college students in business and finance classes as well as adults who are looking to learn more about the stock market. Users can create their own game to compete against classmates or friends and the site includes hundreds of educational articles, videos and assignments.

HowTheMarketWorks says that more than 485,000 students and individuals use the site each year.

Top virtual trading platforms and simulators

TradeStation Simulator

TradeStation is well-known as a broker for high-volume professional traders, and its virtual platform offers the full features of its real-life trading platform.

After registering online, you can start trading with any amount of virtual money you want. The platform will provide you with details of your day’s trades, and you’ll see a report of your gains and losses. Another advantage of TradeStation is that you can test out your hunches, creating automated trading strategies and then using the platform’s real-time data to validate them. However, the simulator is only available for clients who have funded their TradeStation accounts.

TradingView

You can also get your (fake) trade on at TradingView, a charting and social media platform, and maybe even participate in a 30-day trading challenge. You’ll start with $100,000, and you can trade just like you would in real life. Blow that money and simply reset the counter and you’ll have a new hundred grand to work with. The app tracks your progress and records your profit and loss.

TradingView is a popular choice for many traders, who swear by the platform.

Charles Schwab

Charles Schwab’s virtual trading app — paperMoney — puts you in the game with $100,000 in virtual currency, and you’ll be working with the broker’s highly regarded thinkorswim trading platform right from the start. If you don’t already have an account with the broker, you’ll have to register to download the platform, but then you’re cut loose into the whole suite of tools.

The thinkorswim platform is fully featured, and it’s one of the aspects highlighted in our comprehensive review of the broker. Besides the tools, you’ll get streaming news and can watch markets as well as your watchlist. You can backtest strategies and access technical studies and charting, and you’ll find most of the platform’s features enabled in the simulator.

Interactive Brokers

Interactive Brokers brings the functionality of its high-caliber trading platform to virtual trading in what it calls its Paper Trading account. You’ll start as a high-roller with $1 million in paper money available for trading, and you’ll be able to use the broker’s full range of trading tools. While the environment is simulated, the market conditions are real, so you can get a feel for how you might respond under the pressure of the real thing.

If there’s a downside to the broker’s virtual trading simulator, it’s that you have to be a customer to give it a go. You’ll not only have to open an account, but fund it, too. While that requires a little legwork for using the simulator, Interactive Brokers may be the most popular choice of the pros.

Webull

Webull has made a name for itself in the online broker world by offering a popular investment app along with free trading on everything from stocks to options and cryptocurrencies. It also offers users the ability to practice through its paper trading feature.

Once users have registered with the app, they’ll be able to set their account value and begin trading with virtual money. Through paper trading, you’ll be able to track how your trades perform over time and whether your strategies are ready to be used with real money. You’ll be able to see your daily and overall profit and loss statements as well as how much buying power your portfolio has. It’s a nice feature for one of the most popular investment apps in recent years.

eToro

The broker eToro also lets you test out its platform with a demo account that cashes you up with $100,000 in pretend money. You’ll be able to trade stocks, ETFs and cryptocurrencies — all available on the broker’s platform. You’ll need to create an account at eToro, and then you can easily switch your account to “virtual trading” and enjoy the thrill of trading without any of the losses.

When you use the demo account you’ll still get to take advantage of some of the broker’s coolest features such as CopyTrader. This feature allows you to automatically copy some of the broker’s most popular traders, and you’ll also be able to follow traders on social feeds, letting you find what’s new and popular.

Why you should use a stock market simulator

Stock market games and virtual trading really have different purposes and audiences, and they’re both well-suited to their aims.

For those looking to have fun and test out a few stock ideas, stock market games make it easy. You can get in the game with your friends, win some virtual money and just generally have a good time. Bragging rights are nice, but it’s really about learning and fun.

On the other hand, virtual trading or simulators are for serious traders. Virtual trading is all about testing investing strategies and evaluating a broker’s platform, with the possibility that you might take your business there. So a broker’s virtual trading platform is going to throw you into a real market environment. Sure, the money isn’t real, but the market quotes are!

Virtual trading can be a great first step into the market because you can get a feel for how things work. If you make a mistake, it’s all just paper money anyway. That gives you a sense of calm that you’ll never experience when real money is on the line.

While virtual trading can be useful to find your trading groove, the experience will be more intense and emotional when you’re trading with real money and have something to lose. That doesn’t minimize the value of starting with virtual trading, however. Just know the limitations.

Bottom line

Whether you’re playing a stock market game or using virtual trading, it’s important to remember that they’re never quite like the real thing. You’ll react differently when you’re playing with fake money than when you’ve got real dough at stake. So even if you’re familiar with how the market works or how a given broker’s trading platform operates, it’s a good idea to start small and work your way up. You’ll always have the opportunity to invest more money at a later time.