Virtual Trading: the first step in the stock market

To many of those who are interested in trading in the stock market and have read a certain amount of literature on this subject, it seems that, in fact, it is time to test their strength in real affairs. As a result, due to lack of practical training, such merchants quickly lose their money.

To minimize the risk of such “speed losses” and to reset deposits in a matter of days, special simulators of stock trading were invented that allow the newcomer to plunge into the world of online trading without the risk of losing real money. Today, we will take a closer look at foreign and domestic projects in the field of virtual trading in the stock market.

What it is

According to Wikipedia , a stock market simulator (stock market simulator) is a program or application whose purpose is to reproduce or copy some or all of the sides of the real stock market so that the player can practice trading without the risk of financial loss. In such systems, virtual money is used, and stock quotes change in a similar way as it happens on a real exchange.
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The benefits of such programs are obvious - beginners can practice working on the market, master the work with a specific trading terminal (brokers often provide this opportunity), more experienced investors can test different strategies on a virtual account and compare their productivity, and traders using robots usually resort to virtual trading for debugging software.

Now that we have understood what it is and why it is needed, let's take a look at some interesting foreign projects in the field of Virtual Trading.

Wall street survivor

In addition to the funny name, the project offers novice traders (of which 420,000 have already accumulated) the possibility of obtaining both theoretical and practical skills of stock trading. In addition, in fact, a simulator of stock trading, on Wall Street Survivor you can find courses of various levels of complexity that increase the financial literacy of users. And all this for free.



In addition, thanks to a partnership with Bunchball (wrote about this, in particular, TechCrunch ), which specializes in gamification, missions appeared in Wall Street Survivor, which users must complete during the training process in order to receive an award in the form of a badge.

Wall street magnate

The project of the community site of traders, using which you can hone your trading skills. One of its features is the fact that for virtual trading real-time data from the largest American stock exchanges are used. The project will be useful to a wide audience: from students to professional traders who want to test their trading strategies.



After registering (you can log in via Facebook), the trader receives $ 100,000 virtual dollars and can trade in shares traded on the New York Stock Exchanfe, NASDAQ or American Stock Exchange (non-American securities can be bought / sold through American Depositary Receipts - ADR). The special panel shows the dynamics of the trader's portfolio, dividends, history of operations, financial news (collected from Yahoo! Finance, Reuters, CNN Money and The Wall Street Journal) and other useful information.

Virtual trader

British stock trading simulator . Users perform operations and compete with each other. For trading, £ 100,000 of virtual money is given. At the same time, it is possible to use the service and not in the competition mode by creating many different stock portfolios (only one portfolio is selected for the competition). A number of restrictions are imposed on the trading strategies of participants, contributing to the development of their skills - for example, you cannot invest more than 25% of the money in one paper, which forces investors to diversify their strategy.

Trakinvest

The virtual exchange , founded by former head of JP Morgan Bobby Batia, not only teaches users to trade, but also allows the best of them to get real work in the financial sector in emerging Asian markets, thanks to collaboration with organizations such as Thomson Reuters and Religare.



It all works simply - users make transactions on a virtual exchange, earn or lose, and the best of them get the opportunity to do an internship in a financial company from Singapore or Hong Kong, but most traders use the site to enhance exchange trading skills.

Stock market in GTA V

There is an opinion that car theft, shooting and other banditry in this game - just fade before the possibility of large-scale financial fraud. Adam Najberg, a journalist with The Wall Street Journal, like all editorial staff, cannot make transactions with real securities so easily, but the restrictions do not apply to virtual sites.

There are two exchanges available in the game - Liberty City National (LCN) and BAWSAQ, each with its own list of available stocks, tickers and indicators. You can trade on these sites using a browser on your smartphone. The situation on the exchanges intersects with the gaming story - the names of many companies trading on LCN and BAWSAQ are often heard on the radio in stolen cars, or their advertising could be found moving around the city. And what is even more interesting, the player can influence the stock value by his actions “in real life”. For example, if you crush the store of a company that is traded on gaming exchanges, the price of its shares will fall.



In his post, Adam Neuberg talks in some detail about how he earned money on virtual exchanges in GTA V, using different strategies for this. The text is in English, but very interesting.

Now let's talk about how Virtual Trading is developed in our realities.

Russian stock market

The domestic stock market has its own characteristics; it is rather difficult to find out about them using foreign services of virtual trading. The test access to trading conducted on the Moscow Stock Exchange investors is most convenient to carry out through one or another broker. The situation with trading software is the same here as for the “combat” access - the main part makes it possible to use the most common terminal - QUIK, while others - provide access through terminals of their own design.

Matrix Test System

With access through QUIK, everything is generally clear - it does not have any features for users of any broker, but its own development systems are not so uniform. For example, potential investors who want to try their hand at the Russian stock market through ITinvest get access to the Matrix test system, which is an exact copy of the “ combat ” brokerage system.

Everything is really serious: the core of the system is built using Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). High-speed data exchange is based on dedicated Data Power X75 servers and IBM's MQ Low Latency Messaging software. The complex hardware uses PowerEdge blade servers and PowerVault storage systems from Dell.

Directly trading operations can be performed using any of the available trading terminals , such as SmartX. 200,000 virtual rubles are available for trade to a trader, as well as brokerage leverage for performing margin operations. Available for purchase papers traded on the Moscow Stock Exchange.



Virtual trading data is transmitted from the gaming contour of the Moscow Exchange (quotes close to real values), which allows operations not only on an imaginary stock market, but also on the derivatives market (however, not all exchange instruments are available for trading). The exchange does not provide gaming data from the foreign exchange market, so it’s not in the test systems of Russian brokers.

Traders can not only simply trade, but also compete with each other within the special “ Test League of Traders ”, whose members can discuss trading strategies and communicate on various topics of the stock market in a special chat .

That's all for today, thank you for your attention!

PS If you know interesting Russian projects and startups in the field of Virtual Trading, share the links in the comments, and we will add information about the best services to the post.