Trading Game vs Investopedia Simulator: which fits you

The short version

Investopedia is the place most of us learned what a P/E ratio is. Its simulator is free, web-based and built for a long game. Trading Game is a phone app built around one idea: practise the decision, then get told why it worked or did not.

Pick Investopedia if you want to practise building a portfolio of US shares over months, want a proper order ticket with limit orders and options, and want it free. Pick Trading Game if you are new, learn on a phone, want live prices and a lesson before each trade, and want to be told why a trade went wrong. A teacher with a class should start with Investopedia's custom games.

The table below goes through eleven things a beginner meets in the first week and says which product fits each one better, with the reason. Every fact is sourced at the bottom.

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Round by round: which fits you better

Each row is one thing a beginner bumps into in the first week. The last column says which product fits it better, and why.

The facts, side by side

Most cells come from the product's own site, help centre or app-store page, read on 23 October 2026. Two Investopedia items, the $100,000 default and the plain charts, come from third-party reviews and are marked so. Where a company does not say, the cell says so.

Inside Investopedia: what the brochure skips

Here is what you learn about the Investopedia Simulator from its help centre, which almost nobody reads. We did.

The commissions are old-fashioned on purpose. Investopedia charges $19.95 of pretend money for a market order and $29.95 for a limit or stop order. Its own FAQ is titled "Why are your commission fees so high?" and the answer is that the rates are meant to show what commissions do to a return, which beginners often ignore. Fair enough. Most US brokers charge nothing for a stock trade today, so your practice results will run a little worse than your real ones would. A game owner can lower the fee when creating a game.

Everything runs twenty minutes late. Investopedia uses a delayed exchange feed, so a quote shows the price from twenty minutes ago, and an order fills about twenty minutes after you place it. The help centre explains the logic: with delayed quotes, an instant fill would let someone with real-time data trade on a move the site has not shown yet. It adds that real-time quotes cost a premium and there are no plans to add them. For a buy-and-hold investor none of this matters. For anyone learning to read a chart, it is the wrong tool: you need to see the price move as you decide.

The account value updates once a night. The portfolio guide says the account value refreshes after the market closes, so the headline figure can lag the holdings table beneath it.

None of this is a scandal. Investopedia built a simulator for a semester-long investing game, and for that it is excellent. It has over 6,000 US stocks and ETFs, call and put options (buying only, no writing), select cryptocurrencies, short selling and, in the default game, margin. Game rules are the owner's to set: starting cash, commissions, a market delay, even a diversification rule, with no limit on players. You can hand it to a class of thirty and walk away.

Investopedia says the simulator is "trusted by over three million educated investors." Trading Game's site says 4.5 million learners. Both numbers are self-reported, so treat them as a tie and move on. And a change worth knowing if you are Canadian: the new simulator dropped Canadian-dollar games. You can still play, in US dollars, on the two US exchanges.

Inside Trading Game: what you actually do in it

Open the app and it does not hand you $100,000 and a search box. It hands you a chapter. The first lesson takes a few minutes, ends with a question about a chart, and then asks you to try the idea with virtual money. That order is the whole method: learn, predict, trade, review.

The part people remember is the review. Close a losing trade and the app shows the result, then offers an AI Analyse button that explains what the price did. Chart Intelligence, the same reader, can be opened on any chart. It draws the levels it sees, explains its view, and shows a confidence level. The help page says, in plain words, that it is in beta and can be wrong. We like that it says so. Treat it as a second opinion, not a signal.

Prices update several times a second, which you notice the first time a candle moves while you are deciding. The chart has ten timeframes, from 15 seconds to a month, with drawing tools and the usual indicators: moving averages, RSI, volume, Bollinger Bands, VWAP. You set take profit and stop loss on the ticket before you enter. There is no limit order on the ticket; you buy or sell at the price in front of you.

Trading Battles are ten-minute 1v1 matches against a friend, the AI, or a stranger somewhere in the 100-plus countries the site counts. You will find out how impatient you are in about ten minutes.

The deep courses, the full AI coach and unlimited Copy to Chart sit behind Pro. Free gives you the simulator, the basic Academy, a taste of the coach each week and two Copy to Chart uses. That is enough to find out whether this is your kind of practice.

Where Investopedia is the better choice

Open Investopedia first if any of these is you.

You want to practise investing, not trading. Buy a spread of US shares and ETFs, hold them for months, watch the value move. That is exactly what the Investopedia Simulator does. A twenty-minute delay does not matter when your holding period is a year.

You run a class or a club. Public and private games, custom rules, no limit on players, no cost. Investopedia's own guide says educators use it to introduce students to the stock market.

You want to rehearse a real brokerage ticket. Market, limit, stop, day or good-till-cancelled, short selling, options. The ticket has the same fields as a US broker's.

And one thing neither does: tell you whether you are good at this. If you want a simulated return to tell you whether you are good at this. Both simulators will happily show you a number. Neither number predicts anything about your real account. Investopedia's own FAQ has an entry titled "Does success in this simulation mean I can make money in real life?" Read its answer before you trust your score.

Who should pick which

Pick Trading Game if you are starting from nothing and learn better by doing than by reading. It suits ten-minute bursts on a phone, and it has someone, even a beta someone, to tell you what you just did wrong.

Pick Investopedia if you are building a long-term portfolio habit, you want thousands of US tickers, you want the fuller order ticket, or you are the teacher.

Use both if you can spare twenty minutes a day. Do a Trading Game chapter and one practice trade in the morning. Keep a slow Investopedia portfolio of five ETFs on the side and look at it on Fridays. One teaches the decision. The other teaches patience.

A first week that works

Day one: install Trading Game, set the balance to $500, and do the first chapter. Day two: place one trade with a stop loss and let it run. Day three: open the review of that trade and read it slowly. Then, if you like it, open an Investopedia account the same weekend and buy five ETFs you have heard of. Check the Investopedia portfolio once a week and the Trading Game chart once a day. By Sunday you will know which habit stuck.

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