Fantasy Stock Market
There are numerous useful sites that offer fantasy stock markets. These sites are useful not only to track your performance - whether you’re actually investing with real money or not - but they also let you view various statistics and performances of the top players.
Here are some fantasy stock markets:
- Motley Fool CAPS: You can track professional and institutional picks and performances. For example, you’ll see that Jim Cramer only has a 47% accuracy rating. This site is very interesting in that it takes the collective whole of every player’s “votes” for stocks and ranks the stock by a CAPS rating. The cool thing is that the higher you’re ranked overall compared to other players, the more influence your vote has on each stock’s CAPS rating. For those of you familiar with Google’s Page Rank system, CAPS is using essentially the same concept.
- Marketocracy: You can build your own mutual fund. This site allows you to see the asset allocation and returns of the top ranking players, but doesn’t let you see the actual stocks held in each mutual fund. The really cool thing about Marketocracy is that they took the top 100 players and their mutual funds, and created a real fund called the Marketocracy Masters 100 (MOFQX) that you and I can actually purchase!
- Investopedia: As I covered in my useful resources for beginners article, Investopedia has a stock simulator where you can test all your strategies. They even allow you to trade options, short sell, and simulate margin-like scenarios.