"Playing" the market on Updown.com

The website UpDown.com is an online site that simulates trading in the stock market. They give you $1 million in pretend money to trade with. Then if you do better than the S&P 500 in your trades or post stock analysis articles you have a chance to make real money. Its a fun site with a novel idea.

Personally I started an account just for fun. Its helping to convince me that I should not be trading in individual stocks. After about a month's trading my stock picks have lost -1.8% and the S&P500 is up +3.49%. So I'm underperforming the standard by 5%. Not good.

My personal history of trading in individual stocks is not very good. I haven't done a lot of real trading but what I've done hasn't done very well. Also about 10 years ago I setup pretend stock trades in a few stocks just to watch them and see how well they would do. They didn't do very well either. The stocks I picked were Altria, Dupont, Exxon and Chrysler/Daimler. Exxon has done very well in the past 10 years and has basically tripled in that time. But my other picks didn't fare well at all and have more or less remained flat.

I'd recommend trying out UPdown if you are interested in stock trading. Its a fun site to get some practice with stocks and test yourself plus there's zero risk involved and you even have a chance to make real money playing on the site.