How to Practice Stock Trading
The best way to practice stock trading is to pretend trade, using fantasy brokerage accounts and pretend money. This helps beginners get comfortable with the stock market and with losing and gaining. It also helps more seasoned investors try out new trading strategies before investing real money.
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Instructions
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Research your options. There are a number of websites devoted to pretend or practice stock trading and offer fantasy trading in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options and ETFs. Some of the pretend trading sites are free and others charge a monthly fee (see Resources).
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Decide on whether you want to go with free pretend stock trading. If you decide to go this route there are a number of options to choose from such as Investopedia, Wall Street Survivor and Top10Traders. Some of these sites offer real time trading while others are delayed about 15 minutes behind the stock market. Wall Street Survivor actually awards real money and real prizes to members who do exceptionally well.
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Decide whether you will like to pay a little. If you don't mind paying a little, there are pretend trading sites that charge a nominal monthly fee. StockTrak is the sister site to Wall Street Survivor and costs $15 per month. Some other sites like ThinkOrSwim, which is an online service brokerage offers a paper money service alongside the actual trading portion of the site. This allows you practice within the same system before trading with real money.
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Begin trading. Many of the sites give you $100,000 in pretend money to practice with. While you may have access to this much money, it may be valuable to practice with the exact amount of money you may have to invest in the stock market when you start real stock trading.
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Set aside a time for monitoring your trades and stick to it. Pretend trading, especially if you intend to continue in the real market with real money, needs time and attention. When you get comfortable in the fantasy market you might want to start trying for real money.
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