Practice Trading in the Virtual Stock Exchange
Posted by Blain Reinkensmeyer
August 13, 2007 at 11:18 am
This week I am covering a few of the stock simulators available for free, the first being the Virtual Stock Exchange which is a product of MarketWatch.com. Stock simulators are your place to hone your skills by testing out new strategies or simply practice making stock trades.
The Virtual Stock Exchange is easy to use and pretty well laid out. I am still getting the hang of everything, but from signing up to making a trade the process is pretty simple. One thing I enjoyed about the sign up process is that there was no extra jargon or spam beyond asking to see if you wanted to join a newsletter or two. Registration takes maybe two minutes.
From the homepage you can see a portfolio overview of your positions, current ranking, total return for the day, total equity and cash, alongside market headlines and the top players. All of the news obviously
comes from marketwatch.com, and there is even a little research center that allows you to check out a variety of stocks that fall under common screeners (pictures below).
When making a trade, the simulator gives you the option to use any of the order types (market, limit, stops) and you can as well sell stocks short. It is also very easy to figure out how much money you have and what you can afford. For example I tried to buy 100 shares of Google when I didn’t have enough funds, the simulator told me, “You do not have enough buying power to purchase 100 shares of GOOG at $515.57. Your cost of this transaction is $51564.00. Your current total buying power including allowable margins at 50% is $7126.00.”
Overall I think the Virtual Stock Exchange from MarketWatch is a pretty well setup system. They give you the ability to trade stocks with ease and leverage the data from MarketWatch for research and news. The only thing I have yet to find is the ability to trade options through the simulator. Regardless though, it is free and it is simple to use, now to make some more trades…
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I usually watch stocks for a pretty long time before I actually buy. I like using the Motley Fool CAPS system. It’s like a virtual stock market except you don’t pick a number of shares. You basically pick a stock to outperform or under perform the market. Then you can basically watch the stock’s fluctuation from the point you picked it at. The site then scores you based on a comparison of how your stocks did and how the S&P 500 did. It has been a great resource for me so far.
I personally use the portfolio simulator at globeinvestor.com
It is pretty efficient and you get a lot of information from this website as well.
How does this compare to investopedia’s stock simulator? Which one do you prefer?
As of now I would say the investopedia simulator just because it is more sophisticated and you can also trade options. I am somewhat skewed though because Ive used them for years. I enjoyed the simplicity of the Virtual Stock Education, really want to try out the CAPS system though as well.
The CAPS system is sort of just being a stock broker and making your buy or sell recommendations, but it isn’t a portfolio at all…
[...] this week I reviewed the Virtual Stock Exchange stock simulator, which was well setup and easy to use. Today I am covering the stock simulator that [...]
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