Practice Trading in the Virtual Stock Exchange
Posted by Blain Reinkensmeyer on Monday August 13, 2007
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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