Stock trading practice accounts / paper trading

Stock trading practice accounts enable you to trade shares without using real money and are an excellent way of getting to grips with the stock market without the financial risk. Practice accounts are free to set up. The concept of investing without using real money is called paper trading. Everyone should be consistently successful at making money using practice accounts before using real money.

Plus500 offers a great CFD trading environment with a practice account option. Once at the Plus500 website, just click on the Free Demo Account button. Once you setup a practice account, you will be able to practice your trading skills in real market conditions with fake money. Test your skills and see how good you are before you get started with real money.

eToro is another option providing a very rich environment for learning, offering not only a practice trading account, but it is also a social investment network. This means that you can watch what other traders are doing and how they are performing and eToro will even allow you to copy their trades. I think this is a really great hands-on way to get started and learn a whole lot about trading shares. Keep in mind eToro is offers Forex trading.

Another great place to do this is at tradeMONSTER, with their paperTRADE feature. With paperTRADE, you get $100,000 of fake money to practice trading. You can try all of your own ideas and strategies and try all the tools tradeMONSTER has to offer.

Practice Trading with paperTrade – Open a Trading Account with tradeMONSTER!

Another place to practice trading is ADVFN. Though a bit more complex, this offers you another option –

When opening a practice account online, you will receive a free stock market portfolio and a free stock watchlist. You will be able to buy and sell shares with 15 minute delayed data and see profits/losses you make on each stock and on your overall portfolio.

Example portfolio on ADVFN.com