WeSeed.com was founded by Matt Hulsizer and Jenny Just in 2007. We Seed encourages members to buy shares in companies that they are familiar with and purchase from regularly. They have a propriety search engine that can be used to find stocks that might interest you. For example if you love boating then just search boats which might lead you into purchasing shares in Marinemax Inc, a giant new and used boat dealer.
Account Setup:
Account creation at We Seed.com is easy and quick without any intrusive questions. You are just asked for the basics and are also given the option to hide your email and name so that other people cannot search or harass you. Once you have applied for an account you are sent a confirmation link to follow by email. This link has 2 more steps. The first step is to choose the cash balance of your account which I think is a pretty neat feature. There are 4 options here; Rockstar = $1 million, Up and Comer = $10k, Apprentice = 1k and a final option called other where you can specify the amount that you want to start with. The second step is to start buying and selling stocks.
Buying and Selling:
The first thing I notice is that there are no types of buys and sells available at all. A straight buy at a quoted price is your only option, shorting is a no go and don’t even think about trying to place a limit order, OMC, etc. Stocks can be browsed based on their sector or mini-market as We Seed puts it which I think is a nice feature for beginners to the stock market. Selling stocks you own is easy. You browse to your portfolio and click the stock you want to sell. A nifty javascript box pops up with how many shares of that stock you want and the option to sell or buy more at the current market price. Buying and selling is a 3 step process. Select the stock which opens a popup. Select the amount to trade, confirm the trade and maybe give a reason for your trade if you feel like it. There are some funny prewritten reasons to choose from which always crack me up.
An interesting feature is that you can add fake funds to your account if you don’t have enough to place a trade. This feature might confuse people when analyzing how much money they are making if they forget that they added 2k in funds to their 10k initial balance and think they have made way more than they really have. So that’s something to watch out for. In my opinion it would be better if beginners didn’t have this option so that they know exactly how they are performing and learn to manage their cash instead of just inject more when they need it. There is also the option to reset your account completely which is handy for testing strategies and saves you from having to create a new account. Company information includes market news, friendly financials which is a very basic looking income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement and finally a nice basic chart.
Portfolio:
There is only one 5 day chart that tracks your dollar gains over the last 5 days which is a shame if you like charts. Virtual trading performance is monitored through an overall $ amount made and profit or loss on any open positions. Unfortunately you cannot see your trading history; once you close a trade there is no way of knowing where you went well or where you made a horrible mistake. Only a basic summary is given with details like shares currently owned, total trades and current portfolio cash reserves.
Learning:
If you are absolutely new to the stock market there is another reason why you cannot look past We Seed for your first trading simulator, the learning area! We Seed has done an amazing job at putting together a 3 level online school with quizzes and everything. I highly recommend you check We Seed out if you’re a beginner.
Community:
The great thing about We Seed is that the community is able to see each others trades and even reasons they took these trades which is a huge help in the learning process. There are just over 46,000 user accounts as of 14th December 2009. You can chose to follow any member which means you will be able to see what trades they make. We Seed also has community features called groups and teams, groups allow you to compare your investing decisions against friends and family while teams allow you and others to collectively manage a portfolio.
Schools:
We Seed also offers a free product called (We Seed EDU) for classroom environments. IT includes free lessons plans, teacher’s guides, private classrooms and e-letters to help students learn. This would have to rate among the highest stock market learning tool for high schools. If you are a teacher looking to teach your students about the stock market then this is certainly the virtual stock market game you are looking for. Colleges and Universities would require more advanced buying/selling and charting features in my opinion.
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