Stock Trading and Other Things

What is the best stock trading simulator site for free?

I am trying to learn day trading and I have initially tried the trading simulator provided by investopedia.com; it was good, but now I opened a real account and it turns out that I did not learn much, the real brokerage account is totally different: margins, monthly statement, P&L reports... So I am now looking for a stock trading simulator (preferably for free) that has all these features of a real brokerage. Any suggestions?

Public Comments

1. try asking at your local police station.

2. a) No one will provide you the services of a real broker for free, that's the expensive part of their service, all the research etc.
b) day trading is for chumps. Brokers are brokers and not day traders because they realize they can make more money off dozens of people like you flipping their portfolios all the time than by trying to predict what is a very complicated system.
c) the people making real money off day trading type stuff are doing so by running sophisticated algorithms on super-computers, doing trades on fractions of seconds, or by pulling the crazy stuff that brought down the world's markets on scales way outside anything you can manage.
d) Anyone who's offering a 'system' for making money from day trading is lying: they've figured out that they make more cash from selling their system to suckers than by using it.

I would think harder about your choice of career.

3. Investopedia. You won't get the excitement of the quick ups and downs and how your volume affects price on low volume stocks. But you can get the excitement of guessing the direction of each trade.
Good Luck.

4. PaperMoney by ThinkOrSwim is a great trading simulator that is very similar to actual trading. The ThinkOrSwim software can be a bit overwhelming at first, but if you are willing to try to learn it, then it will likely help you out.

5. I like the one at Wall Street Survivor - http://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com I like it because it gives you a decent amount of virtual money ($100,000) to start virtual trading with.

My real brokerage is Schwab. I don't use the virtual trading platforms for real trading because I already had a real brokerage account before I learned about virtual trading.

6. You noticed it correctly that investopedia trading simulator falls short as far providing fully simulated brokerage experience. They for example simply have a notion of "account" without distinguishing between "cash account" and "margin account" which work quite differently. You can do short selling in investopedia simulator, but they do not truly simulate all brokerage rules involved in such transaction. I would suggest checking out VivaTrader. It has quite interesting stock trading simulator – all online – no need to install anything on your computer. They do produce monthly statements just the way real broker would do for you. They meticulously simulate most, if not all, aspects of margin account including charging interest, paying inertest, margin calls and etc.
As a side benefit they have quite advanced charting, interesting trading blog, stock scanners, and alerts... Have fun!