Virtual Trading: the first step in the stock market / ITI Capital Blog

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 try their hand at real business. As a result, due to insufficient practical training, such traders quickly lose their money.

To minimize the risk of such “speed losses” and zero deposits in a few days, special exchange trading simulators were invented that allow a newcomer to plunge into the world of online trading without risking losing real money. Today we take a look in more detail 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 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 a player can practice trading without risk of financial loss. Such systems use virtual money, and stock quotes change in a similar way, as is the case on a real exchange.

The benefits of such programs are obvious - beginners can practice working in the market, master working with a specific trading terminal (often brokers provide this opportunity), more experienced investors can test various strategies on a virtual account and compare their productivity, and traders usingrobots usually resort to virtual trading for debugging software.

Now that we have figured out 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 (who have already accumulated 420,000) the opportunity to acquire both theoretical and practical skills in exchange trading. In addition to the exchange trading simulator, on Wall Street Survivor you can find courses of various difficulty levels that increase the financial literacy of users. And all this is free.



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

Wall street magnate

A project of a site-community of traders, using which you can hone your trading skills. One of its features is the fact that real-time data from the largest American exchanges are used for virtual trading. 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 make transactions with shares traded on the New York Stock Exchanfe, NASDAQ or American Stock Exchange (non-American securities can be bought / sold through American Depository Receipts - ADR). On a special panel are showntrader’s portfolio dynamics, dividends, transaction history, 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. £ 100,000 virtual money is given for trading. At the same time, you can use the service not in the competition mode, creating many different stock portfolios (only one portfolio is selected for the competition). A number of restrictions are imposed on the trading strategies of the participants that contribute to the development of their skills - for example, you cannot invest more than 25% of 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 educates users in trading, but also allows the best of them to get real work in the financial sector in emerging Asian markets, thanks to cooperation with organizations such as Thomson Reuters and Religare.



Everything works simply - users make operations on the virtual exchange, earn or lose, and the best of them get the opportunity to take an internship in a financial company from Singapore or Hong Kong, but most traders use the site to improve their exchange trading skills.

Stock market in GTA V

It is believed that car theft, shooting, and other banditry in this game simply fade before the possibility of large-scale financial fraud. The Wall Street Journal Adam Najberg, like all the editorial staff, cannot easily deal with real securities, but the prohibitions do not apply to virtual sites.

Two exchanges are 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 platforms using the browser on your smartphone. The situation on exchanges intersects with the game plot - the names of many companies trading on LCN and BAWSAQ often sound on the radio in stolen cars, or their ads could be seen moving around the city. And even more interestingly, a player can influence the value of shares through his actions in real life. For example, if you defeat the store of a company that is trading 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. Textin 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, which are quite difficult to learn about using foreign virtual trading services. Test access to trading conducted on the Moscow Exchange is most convenient for investors through a broker. The situation with the software for trading here is the same as for the "combat" access - the bulk 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 understandable in general - it does not have any features for users of any broker, but proprietary systems are not so uniform. For example, potential investors who want to try their hand at the Russian stock market through ITinvest gain 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 specialized Data Power X75 servers and IBM MQ Low Latency Messaging software. The complex hardware uses PowerEdge server blades and Dell PowerVault storage systems.

Directly trading operations can be performed using any of the available trading terminals , for example SmartX. For trading, 200,000 virtual rubles are available for the trader, as well as a broker “leverage” for performing margin operations. Available for purchase are securities traded on the Moscow Exchange.



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

Traders can not only just perform trading operations, but also compete with each other in the framework of a special " Test Traders League ", the participants of which can discuss trading strategies and communicate on various topics of the stock market in a special chat .

That's it for today, thanks for watching!

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.