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How The Market Works is a free stock market and forex trading game that began in 2004 at the hands of Marketworks LLC. HowTheMarketWorks.com aims to do just what it’s called and help beginners understand the mysterious financial markets.
Account Setup:
Registration was as easy as I’ve seen it, just name, email and password. Your login name is just your email which means you won’t have to remember any made up on the spot alias that is always forgotten. You will need to setup your portfolios the first time you login to your new account. There are some interesting options here that allow the game to cater to a variety of users. The first option is to set your portfolio to “Fun Mode” or “Realistic Mode”. Fun mode is for beginners with only market order based trades, unlimited trade values and immediate order execution. Realistic mode tries to simulate a real broker and real market environment as closely as possible.
The next step is to name your portfolio and set the starting value of your portfolio which can be between $100 and $500,000. The last setting is an interesting one; you are able to set how much virtual commission you are charged per trade. You are able to setup 3 stock market and forex market portfolios or create/join a contest linked portfolio.
Buying and Selling:
Trading is done from your portfolio page with available trading options depending on what type of portfolio you are using “Real or Fun”. Real mode portfolios have limit, market, stop limit, stop market and trailing orders available along with the ability to short sell. Each trade is previewed before the order goes through. Fun mode orders go through instantly while real mode orders only execute when the market is open. Commission per trade ranges from $0 to $50 and is entirely up to you like I said before in portfolio setup. There is a great inbuilt stock screener for doing fundamental analysis on the stock market. Each company has its own set of charts and news aswell.
Account Summary:
How The Markets Work really excels when it comes to portfolio and account data. There are three areas to monitor your portfolios activity and performance. Account Summary lets you know what positions you currently hold and how much cash you have available. Trading history for the past 90 days with date, price, stock and commission is something I don’t often see in stock simulators for some reason but How The Markets Work has it and its extremely handy. Finally a performance chart comparing your returns and the S&P is given.
Community:
The community is not as strong as other financial games because of the way the site is set up. On the other hand though there is a fairly active forum that you are automatically signed up to when you create your account. The other social aspect of the game comes from the public contests. There are over 500 contests running at present.
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