Use this day trading simulator to practice buying and selling stocks while leveraging real-time data and trading charts

Play a game that reveals if investors with a crystal ball make better trades

The "crystal ball" game reveals how well you would do trading stocks and bonds if you could see the front page of the Wall Street Journal one day in advance.

While day trading has risen in popularity in recent years, the SEC warns it is a speculative strategy that can cause big losses

A day trader is anyone who buys and sells a stock within the same trading day. They quickly move in and out of the market to try and profit. Some day traders are professionals, while others are retail investors.

Investors need a 'margin account' to short sell stock

Margin accounts are leveraged accounts through brokerage firms that allow investors to make trades without the full amount of capital on hand. Similar to a secured loan, margin accounts often require some form of collateral and typically have a cap on how much investors can borrow. However, trading with a margin account is much riskier than a traditional investment account. Fees and charged interest are due on margin accounts, regardless of trade performance, meaning it's possible for investors to lose more money than just their initial investment.

Learn how to build a retail investing toolkit

Retail investors may not have the same resources institutional players do, but thanks to the internet, they can access several free tools that provide a leg up. These tools do everything from recommending portfolio allocations to helping investors screen stocks.

Use a prediction market profit or loss calculator

In order to calculate how much someone would make from a specific trade on a prediction market, this calculator asks for the purchase price of a given "yes" or "no" prediction, the number of contracts the trader plans to purchase, and more.

A beginner's guide to online stock trading

For beginners, the first step to trading stocks online is finding a good broker.

Simulate asteroid impact, mitigation, and defense scenarios

Tens of thousands of asteroids are in orbit in our solar system, and only a fraction come close enough to concern humanity. This simulator allows you to see the big picture scenarios of an asteroid impact, strategies to mitigate its destruction, and how Earth could defend itself.

Simulations incorporating mixed reality have improved trainee certification rates

Such software provides immersive, risk-free environments where students can manipulate digital re-creations to optimize the training experience without producing waste. One meta-analysis showed that MR in welding training boosted passing rates on certification exams by 41.6% versus traditional training methods.

The stock market has crashed many times throughout history

Have you ever wondered how long it takes the market to recover after a crash? This chart outlines major stock market dips throughout history and tracks how many days it took for the market to recover.

The medical uses of VR

Virtual healthcare simulations are bridging the gap between traditional classroom learning and real clinical experience, improving the safety, effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare services.

See how much key commodities are trading for in real time

This tracker shows the current price of common commodities such as crude oil, lumber, nickel, and many more, as well as how much these prices have fluctuated over the past day, year, week, and month.

Electronic trading transformed investing, ushering in a new era for retail investors in which average Americans could research stocks online and then use early platforms like StreetSmart and E-Trade to conduct their transactions

In the early 1990s, stock brokerages knew that online trading would be a great equalizer, creating opportunities for more individuals to buy and sell stocks.

Explore a step-by-step guide for getting started as a retail investor

Instead of purchasing individual stocks and bonds, new investors may want to start in funds that track an index—like the S&P 500—or that hold a group of themed stocks.

Learn how to invest in index funds with this step-by-step guide.

The do's and don'ts of using AI to manage your finances

Experts suggest avoiding asking AI for investment advice, but say it's useful for basic budgeting help. Read this article to learn more.

Simulate the effects of changing supply and demand on the electric grid

In this application, users can modify the demand of fictional cities and the supply of various generators, including a nuclear power plant and a wind farm, which can be disconnected from the grid. Notice that current may flow into or out of external systems to compensate for available generation. See what it takes to cause a blackout in different cities or shut down the entire grid.

Read about a dating simulation game that helps prepare your income taxes

For the 2022 tax year, prank-playing creative studio MSCHF created a dating simulation game that helped taxpayers prepare their income taxes. In "Tax Heaven 3000," players interact with anime love interest Iris (it's like IRS), and run through a series of questions that complete their taxes. Iris also warns the player to stay away from tax-preparation companies like TurboTax.

Shorting is a high-risk and expensive investment strategy that hedge funds specialize in

Most investors buy stocks with the expectation that those stocks will be worth more tomorrow than they are today. Short selling, known as “shorting,” a stock is the opposite: The investor is betting the stock will drop in value.

'The stock market' can be loosely defined as a set of exchanges and other places where shares of public companies are bought and sold.

Jim Simons, mathematician turned government codebreaker turned trader, revolutionized quantitative investing

The late Jim Simons is remembered as one of the most successful (and profitable) hedge fund managers of all time. He went from physically gathering microfilm on commodities pricing decades ago to overseeing a firm that led Wall Street in daily trading volume.

Simulate geological activity at plate boundaries using virtual planetary models.

Retail investors are getting burned by long/short strategies

In the US, many retail investors lack the SEC-mandated status (a high enough net worth, income, and other factors) to directly invest in hedge funds. The regulator considers hedge funds too risky for the masses. Hedge fund-like strategies have emerged as a workaround, despite potential pitfalls.

See the news with AI-generated data visualizations

Realtime uses generative AI to create immediate data visualizations of news items on its regularly-updated feed, pulling from public data feeds. Peruse stories around sports, economics, politics, and more with the helpful aid of charts and graphs. See the shape of the news with this clever AI tool here.

The stock market, explained in 3 minutes

The stock market consists of a set of exchanges and other venues where shares of public companies are bought and sold. The Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange are two of the most well-known exchanges in the US, while major exchanges also operate around the world, including in Tokyo, Shanghai, London, and São Paulo.

How COVID-19 brought new investors into the market

With fees removed from the equation and more time at home thanks to pandemic-related lockdowns, Americans who had never bought or sold stocks before started participating in the market. Charles Schwab dubs this cohort “Generation Investor” and notes individuals from all age ranges took part in this phenomenon. Study up here.

Look inside a retail investor's portfolio

Online investing platform eToro conducted a survey of retail investors in June 2024. It explored what assets they held and what types of stocks they liked to purchase. The most commonly held asset was cash, with 76% of retail investors holding cash in their portfolios. The next most popular asset was domestic stocks, with 49% of investors.

Try out an emulated version of the TI-84 Plus CE, the graphing calculator released by Texas Instruments in 2015.

Prediction markets—the platforms where users can trade bets that pay out depending on certain event outcomes—have faced questions about insider trading.

Can your family farm survive the Great Depression?

Find out in this free simulation game where you play a pair of twins trying to weather the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. Your choices determine the ending, so choose your moves wisely!

Prediction market Kalshi's CEO Tarek Mansour ​​has said that prediction markets are similar to the stock market—except instead of buying and selling shares of companies, users buy and sell "yes" or "no" on whether an event is going to happen or not.

How to put on a hedge

These days, hedging your portfolio isn’t just for hedge fund managers. An explainer from Robinhood delves into what a hedged position actually is, why traders put on hedges, and how you, too, can work to guard your holdings against a market downturn. The idea is to derive gains from your portfolio when markets are trending up, down, or sideways.

In early 2021, GameStop's stock surge brought retail investing into the spotlight.

The NYSE is one of the few remaining stock exchanges where much active trading still happens in person on the trading floor.

Want to begin trading in cryptocurrency? Check out these exchanges

Explore the current cryptocurrency market. CoinMarketCap tracks 242 spot exchanges where various cryptocurrencies are traded. Newbie and experienced traders will find timely exchange ranks and scores charted according to traffic, liquidity, and trading volumes. CoinMarketCap promises legitimacy in all trading volumes reported.

40 key stock market terms, explained

Liquidity. Forex. Capitalization. Blue chip stocks. These are just a few pieces of stock market vocabulary most people who don't spend all day on a trading floor might not know. Thankfully, we found a fun infographic that makes it easier to learn what 40 key stock market terms mean and why each of them matters.

Virtual platform lets surgeons train remotely and in real time

Advancements in health tech are breaking barriers, as trainee surgeons can now virtually join live operations without stepping into the operating room. This 6-minute video from BBC takes a look at Proximi's cloud-based platform, which enables...

Visualizing decades of stock market performance

Stock markets and the indexes that track their biggest companies tend to ebb and flow, with long growth periods punctuated by shorter recessions. Track the 60-year history of one of the most common stock market indexes, the S&P 500, with this data visualization. The chart highlights the long-term durability of markets despite appearance of short-term volatility.

‘Demo days’ are when founders at Y Combinator pitch their startup ideas

Investors sit in the audience, waiting to hear what this season’s batch of YC founders have cooked up. YC argues that going through the process of a demo day can help founders get a better understanding of their startup themselves.

Retail investing by the numbers

When average Americans began pouring into the stock market, Wall Street wasn’t sure if its new guests were there to stay. But at the end of 2023, Public confidently declared that retail investors “weren’t going anywhere” after 30 million new individuals began buying and selling stock. Download the report to learn more here.

'Daily fantasy' is a high-stakes subset of fantasy sports

The form, pioneered by platforms like FanDuel and DraftKings, uses anonymous daily leagues and large payouts, looks more like typical betting than the season-long, community-minded setup of more traditional fantasy.

See if you can maintain a perfect credit score with this game.

Use this interactive calculator to see if you could rebalance the federal budget by adjusting taxes and spending.

Donald Trump's Truth Social social media platform is launching a prediction market

Named "Truth Predict," the cryptocurrency-based prediction market will allow users of the Truth Social social media platform to place crypto bets on the outcome of certain events (think: sports games, the economy, and political races). Truth Social is primarily owned by President Donald Trump and his family.

What 401(k) savers near retirement can do amid market volatility

If you're close to retirement, volatility in the stock market can feel scary. This guide for 401(k) savers has suggestions on what to do with your retirement accounts during uncertain times, based on how close you are to the age you'd like to retire.

A fascinating look at how a journalist spends 24 hours in the metaverse

A Wall Street Journal strapped on a VR headset for a full day. Here's what happened when she went to work meetings, hung out with new avatar friends and attended shows — all in the metaverse.

Test your ETF knowledge

A 10-question quiz from the SEC allows investors to test their basic knowledge about exchange-traded funds and their investing counterparts, mutual funds. Here’s a sample question: Is the past performance of a fund a good indicator of future results? (Hint, the answer is no).

Prediction markets and sports betting are not forms of investing, despite how some fans portray them.

Relive the biggest swings in the Dow’s history

From the 1929 crash to the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2020, this piece spotlights five of the most dramatic single-day moves in the Dow’s 125-year history.

A stock market timeline

The stock market has come a long way since the 1600s, when the first version of a stock exchange was created in Amsterdam. Mile markers along the way include everything from the Dow Jones Industrial Average's creation in 1896 to the stock market woes during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free.