Good online portfolio to practise stock/share trading?

March 9, 2007 10:11 AM

Does anyone know of a good real-time online stocks/shares portfolio tool I can use to practise becoming a Warren Buffet style gazillionaire? I am poor and wish to become rich beyond my wildest dreams...virtually. Thanks in advance.
posted by you're only jung once to Work & Money (7 answers total)

Warren Buffet style investing is measured, slow, boring, and fundamentals driven. This is very different than "real-time" day-trading and other investments that you jump into and out of (also called trading on technicals). Now it's impossible to say that you can't become a gazillionaire either way. But a lot more people have gotten rich the old fashioned fundamentals way than the new-fangled technical indicators way.

That said, I recommend buyandhold.com for when you start actually investing.

For getting technical data (and lots of discussion), I like stockworm. Lots of awesome charts in their free tools.
posted by zpousman at 10:27 AM on March 9, 2007

My husband is a stock market guru. When he is not managing our real stocks, he plays around on Marketocracy and also the Motley Fool's CAPS competition. He is a huge Buffet fan, so maybe these would be up your alley.
posted by Ostara at 10:36 AM on March 9, 2007

Are you just talking about tracking pretend portfolios of real stocks? I feel like my answer is too obvious since there are scads of ways to do this online. But anyway:

Go to finance.yahoo.com, click on "My Portfolios" (may need to be logged into Yahoo. Probably, in fact). Click on "Create a new Portfolio." There are 3 choices, depending on how much transaction data you want to enter (or in your case, "make up.")

At the very least you can track a list of symbols day-to-day; I'm pretty sure you can also enter a number of shares and a purchase date and it'll run total return and annual return calculations for you. I know it used to do this, but they turned off a lot of "My Finance" features some years ago and I quit paying attention.
posted by rkent at 11:04 AM on March 9, 2007

Personally, I use Google Finance for this purpose. You can create multiple portfolios for different groupings of stocks, and their historic data is really nicely organized.
posted by autojack at 11:05 AM on March 9, 2007

CNBC has a "Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge" They give you $1,000,000 play money and if you invest it well you have a chance to win $1,000,000 real money...
posted by MrBCID at 4:42 PM on March 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

My friends and I play on Marketwatch's Virtual Stock Exchange. We have a private game, everyone gets $10k in virtual cash, and whoever has the most after 3 months wins.

There are public games you can join, or you can play against your friends.
posted by exhilaration at 7:45 PM on March 9, 2007

Investopedia.com also has a portfolio-building section, and is a good reference, to boot.
posted by FuManchu at 10:57 AM on March 10, 2007