I’ve always wanted to be a day trader. There’s just something about the chance of making money from nothing but clever buys/sells. The only problem is, I’m broke. Just to start an account at most brokers you have to have $1,000. I may have the money but I’m not at the point in my life where I can throw it into some stocks.
What’s more, I don’t even know how to buy/sell stocks to begin with. Well at least I didn’t. That is changing for the most part since I joined (for free) WallStreetSurvivor.com. Now I can lose money with the best of them. All joking aside, I’ve really learned a lot about the market from this site. For instance, I had no idea what selling short and buying on the margin were before I started playing this game.
There’s also some really cool tools in the game such as performance charts speeding up the scaling phase. There’s a ticker showing some of the latest trades by other players. Oh I forgot to mention that you compete against the other players for prizes.
I had an idea for something like this a couple of years ago, but my version of the game was setup more like an online casino atmosphere. I’m not sure if any of you have played Texas Hold’em on the old online poker sites but that was the idea I wanted for my stock simulator. People could compete in tournaments. There would be an entry fee, and the house would get a bit of a cut from the pool. Hey, I had to run the website with something. Unfortunately, that idea never took off, mainly because I didn’t want to research the legality of such a business indeavor. I may actually start working on that idea and give WallStreetSurvivor.com a run for it’s money.