A-Train Finance

There is absolutely no 100% correct way to start investing or trading, unless every single one of your trades are gainers. If that is the case, I am available through the ‘contact’ section of this site and have an offer for you that you simply cannot refuse. For the rest of us, we need time to practice our discipline. Just like learning to ride a bicycle, playing a new instrument or learning how to code a website in PHP there is an absolute learning curve. For the sake of the analogy, I can only pray that you don’t fall off your bike as many times as you might fall off the proverbial horse in the stock market, because that is going to be a lot of very unfortunate hospital trips. If you want to test your wings before you jump, I’ve scoured the web to find you the tools to test your trading abilities and see if you’ve got what it takes, maybe while making some cash in the mean time. Check out these free tools and communities to practice trading!

Wall Street Survivor: is a pretty awesome paper trading site that is actually based around a contest. Currently (it started January 2nd) happening is a contest for a total of $50,000 dollars which is sponsored by OptionsXpress. They start you out with a $100,000 fake portfolio and let you trade in ‘real time’ to try to beat out everyone else. The top traders win a split of the prizes at the end of the contest which is on April 25th, 2008. I like the layout of the site, as it’s very well put together. It might be worth a shot going after that contest money! I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

UpDown: is the only real market trading simulation that I’ve found that you can actually get paid for your investing and analysis skills regardless of other members’ performance. They pay you when you have a solid strategy because, according to the ‘about’ page:

‘The UpDown is funded and backed by hedge fund professionals who pay performance fees based on how well these strategies perform. We share most of these revenues with The UpDown community because our performance depends heavily on the size of the community and the portfolio performance of its members.’

I believe currently the top performing member on the site has currently returned almost 156% and has earned almost $2000 dollars in real money because of his picks. They give you a $1,000,000 dollar practice account and it seems to work well with a current community of roughly 5,000 members- definitely worth checking into.


Bull Poo: is another investing and trading community that is similar to UpDown. They give you a $1,000,000 dollar practice account to test your investing strategies with. One thing I found annoying about this one is the 20 minute delay that you have to wait for placing orders. I feel like there is a better way to do this that wouldn’t be so cumbersome. Also, I haven’t used it terribly recently, but a few months ago when I did the site was relatively buggy and would crash every now and then. I’m sure they’re working out the kinks as it is by far one of the more popular of the investing and trading community sites. They have blogs, member analysis, some pretty big time finance writers are on Bull Poo so it definitely might be worth checking out.

Thinkorswim: doesn’t entirely fit in the same category as all the other ones, because Thinkorswim is actually a broker that you can trade real money with. They offer a very solid software trading platform that I believe trader Timothy Sykes uses and one that I will also switch over to at some point (I’m currently using Scottrade). The cool thing about this broker, is that they allow you to download their trading software and use it to paper trade a fake $100,000 portfolio in REAL TIME. They save you from the ‘20 minute delay’ syndrome that you suffer whenever you look up a stock price on Yahoo.com, Google.com, or any other non-pay public site. I’m sure that Thinkorswim is hoping that once you get comfortable with papertrading their software, you’ll fund the account and use them as your main broker. On that topic, their commissions seem are very reasonable, flexible and I’ve heard very good things. I’ll review it more when I actually use it for real money.

Covestor: doesn’t quite fit the bill into any of these categories either, but it’s last but not least here we go. Covestor is another investing/trading community that is fairly new. If you’ve noticed, I’ve just recently started using it on A-Train Finance to keep track of my trading performance for the ‘Trading Challenge’. There is no ‘fake portfolio’ on this one. You actually link up Covestor to your REAL brokerage account and it tracks your trades automatically while calculating your percentage of return and overall performance to the Covestor community. I think this is a very cool concept because you can technically audit (maybe not officially or ‘legally’) all of your trades. It also supplies a widget to prove that you either do or do not have a position in a stock at a particular time of writing. The support is very friendly and I’ve actually worked with them a few times to fix bugs I’ve found with the site. Give this one some time and I definitely think it will be a big player in the open communities.

Well, that’s it! I hope you found this helpful and if you did, why not subscribe to my blog A-Train Finance. You can either get daily e-mail updates, or subscribe with an RSS reader. Thanks!