Free stock software downloads and resources

Instead of diving into the deep end, wouldn't it be cool to buy and sell stocks and mutual funds in a virtual world, with virtual money, until you get really good at it. Once you're up to speed, you start trading for real! Sounds good? Sorry but this isn't going to help you. Stock & mutual fund simulation games won't apply to the real world.

You can buy simulation games, even for kids, that allow you to interact with a virtual stock exchange, buying and selling stocks. But in reality, you can't buy such a simulator and then train yourself to trade stocks for a profit. The data for the real stock market is about as random as can be. You can't detect any trends to predict the future price. It just doesn't work that way.

Now people will tell you that you can. For example, that the market is "elastic". That means that if it starts of low in the morning and rises, it'll tend to come back down a little by the end of the trading day. Likewise, if it starts of high and goes low, it'll tend to go up again by day's end. Is that really true? Of course not! If it was, Wall Street sharks would see that the stock market was going down, then by mid day, go in and buy, selling right before the closing bell. That'd be a money machine, if ever there was one. You think it's that easy? Money does not grow on trees my friend. If there was that effect say 100 years ago, someone would've noticed it and done exactly what we said above. Them buying at noon would drive the stock up, so by the time you decided to buy, the price wouldn't be low any more. OK, so you could buy earlier in the day; the profit would be a bit less, buy it'd still be like buying a gold mine. Then someone else gets the idea to buy even earlier than you, and so you get into a war with everyone else because you notice you're no longer making money so you start buying even still earlier. Every time someone else gets a hold of this idea and enters the game, the extra competition makes your profit go down. Without too many people at all, you can see that the profit you make goes away, and the market "corrects" itself to get rid of this "inefficiency". You can't see all this in a stock & mutual fund simulation.

With the millions of people and trillions of dollars in the market you can see that the market is incredibly efficient and you're not going to be able to beat it. You can still make money by investing because on average and over the long haul, stock & mutual fund prices do tend to go up. But don't get into the trap of thinking that you're the smartest person on the planet.

The upshot is that stock & mutual fund simulation may be fun, but they won't teach you how to trade in order to make any money in the real world.