A stock market simulator is a program or application that attempts to reproduce or duplicate some or all features of a live stock market on a computer so that a player may practice trading stocks without financial risk.
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Stock market simulators can be broken down into two major categories - financial market simulators, and fantasy simulators.
Financial market simulators allow users to generate a portfolio based on real stock entries, but with virtual currency. Most of the currently active financial simulators use a delayed data feed of between 15 and 20 minutes to ensure that users cannot use their data to trade actively on a competing system. The purpose behind such a system is to let a person practice with fantasy funds in a real-world context so they can determine whether or not they would gain money investing by themselves.
Fantasy simulators trade shares or derivatives of real world items or objects that normally would not be listed on a commodities or market exchange, such as movies or television shows. Some simulators focus on sports and have been linked to active betting and wager based systems.
Most of the online stock simulators run on either Java, JavaScript, ASP or php with a mysql database. Some of them are open source, and others are proprietary with the code being sold as valuable prediction market software. Such is the example with the HSX Virtual Specialist. This technology has been sold to major film studios such as MGM and Lion's Gate Films, as well as to the Popular Science team for use in their PPX system.[1]
Stock Market simulator engines can also be customized for other functions than just basic stock information tracking. The HSX engine has been modified to track popular science trends and also to track Youtube videos. Other applications that can be implemented with this software include popularity tracking and ranking from a set scale rather than an actual numerical value.
Stock market games are speculative games that allows players to trade stocks in a virtual or simulated stock market.
Stock market games exist in several forms but the basic underlying concept is that these games allow players to gain experience or just entertainment by trading stocks in a virtual world where there is no real risk. Some stock market games do not involve real money in any way. Players compete with each other to see who can predict the direction the stock markets will go next. Many stock market games are based on real life stocks from the Nasdaq, NYSE or other major market indexes.
Stock market games are often used for educational purposes to teach potential stock traders and future stock brokers how to trade stocks.
Some Stock market games are not based on financial markets at all. These virtual stock markets are often based on things like sports or entertainment 'stocks'. Players are asked to invest in a particular sports team for example.If the team is doing well, the stock goes up and if the team is playing badly the stock value for that team falls. Another stock market game, Empire Avenue, links a player's share value to their activity on social media sites thus motivating players to invest virtual currency in other players whose social media influence ranks highly.[2] Stock market games are often built in to many other prediction games.