Nice. You should post benchmarks comparing the player's return to that of some well-defined AI's, like one which is always an optimist, one that's contrarian, and one that's a monkey throwing darts.
It would be a real eye-opener to those who do worse than the monkey.
Pretty fun, but not very realistic in the sense that the trade is taken exactly after 10 or 20 days. You don't allow setting stop losses, etc.
Chartarcade.com is a really good stock simulator. It's been around for a while, also uses real stock data, and allows you to buy and sell while incrementing on a per-day or per-week basis. It's actually a really good tool for learning how to buy and sell stocks on a swing basis.
Its seems like a really cool idea. I have one question: Where do you get all the previous financial data? You scrape from the financial sites?
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Shameless plug: There is a site I recently built which is kinda related. (I just finished it last week. Still doing some testing, but would like to gather some feedback) Its called QuantHunt (http://www.quanthunt.com/) Basically you write a forex trading bot using a simple API and your progress is tracked in a leaderboard. Real world ticker data is used for the prices.
This is a re-launch of a web app I made a few years ago. I'm operating on the freemium model: pay a small one-time fee for access to premium features such as trade position size and price/volume indicators. Feedback needed, thanks!
I have data for all US stocks since 2000. At this point I limit the web app to the past few years or so, and only for S&P 100 stocks. I'll eventually open up more data for the premium users.
I also got to almost $2 million after a couple hundred trades, but then just started pushing buy every time and went back down to $100k. I helped my dad get up $40k on etrade in the 4 months just before 9/11, pleaded with him to collect his winnings in August, and then it all trickled away in the weeks afterwards. Stock trading is just a casino where the odds are 2% in your favor each day, but only the rich can play. I think hackers make good traders because of their contrarian nature, and ability to stay cool and read signs that most people are too impatient/impulsive to see.
Bottom line (but very controversial among any diverse group of investors): it doesn't work. I always try to steer people away from it if - it's one of those big choices in life (like choosing a good wife or husband) that can have a major impact a few decennia down the line.
If you're getting your data free from Yahoo (scraping or API), aren't you limited by their non-commercial use clauses? That is, if you try to make money off of it without buying the data, doesn't that open you up to a huge liability risk?
Pretty sure that's stipulated all throughout their service (that you may not use any of their data for commercial purposes without their permission).
Acquiring that kind of data for commercial purposes normally costs a lot of money (relatively speaking).
Thanks for trying. Paypal shut me down because they think I'm a financial services provider and are asking for all my professional membership licenses :(
Ssssh: If you click the paypal button now, I've redirected it to upgrade you for free!
Neat idea, it worked perfectly on the samsung galaxy s2 with android. I did a bunch of trades and lost money on most and got up to the screen to hit the user with the "pay me or go away" screen. On that screen, clicking "close" link makes the entire frame popup blink once, indicating failed click and no action taken.
Reloading the page brought me back to the main screen for 14 more trades.
Clicked buy now to see if that worked, pondered throwing you the 10 bucks. Paypal says: This recipient is currently unable to receive money.
Thanks for trying. Paypal shut me down because they think I'm a financial services provider and are asking for all my professional membership licenses :(
Ssssh: If you click the paypal button now, I've redirected it to upgrade you for free!
I haven't tried this on my Galaxy Nexus so I'm surprised that it worked as well as it did on your phone.
It would be a real eye-opener to those who do worse than the monkey.