The first time most people place a real trade, they are learning two things at once: how the software works, and whether their idea about the market was any good. Those are very different problems, and mixing them is expensive. You click “sell” when you meant “sell short,” you buy 100 shares when you meant 10, you discover your stop order was never actually submitted — and every one of those mistakes costs real money to learn something a manual could have taught you.
A stock market simulator separates those two problems. It gives you a full trading interface, a price chart that moves the way a market moves, and a balance of fake money, so the mechanical mistakes cost nothing. You get to be bad at the software in private.
What a stock market simulator actually is
A simulator is a trading platform where the money and the price feed are both simulated and everything built around them works the way it really works. Be clear on the data: Stockade’s prices are generated algorithmically, not pulled from an exchange, and there is no live feed behind them. What they do is behave like market data — proper OHLC candles with an open, high, low and close, volume that shifts from bar to bar, and the long wicks that make real charts awkward to read. The order types are the real order types. The account math — cash balance, position size, unrealized profit and loss, account equity — follows the same arithmetic your broker uses. What is missing is the settlement: nobody sends your order to an exchange, and no cash leaves an account.
That distinction matters. A simulator is not a game with a market theme; it is a working model of a market with the consequences removed. The skills that transfer are the mechanical ones — sizing a position, working an order, keeping a record. The one that does not transfer is the one you need most, and we will get to it below.
Stockade’s simulator starts you with $100,000 in virtual capital and runs entirely in your browser. There is no signup and no account; your positions and history live in your browser’s local storage. That design has an obvious tradeoff — clear your browser data and your history goes with it — but it means you can start in seconds instead of filling out a form.
The mechanics you are actually there to learn
Before any strategy question there is a layer of pure plumbing that trips up almost everyone. This is what a simulator teaches best.
Order types
A market order buys or sells immediately at whatever price is currently available. It guarantees you get filled; it does not guarantee the price.
A limit order sets a maximum you will pay or a minimum you will accept. Place a limit buy on a stock at $47.50 while it trades at $48.20 and nothing happens until the price comes to you. It guarantees the price; it does not guarantee you get filled at all. (Market orders vs. limit orders goes deeper on when each one fits.)
A stop-loss is a resting order that becomes active when price moves against you past a level you chose. It is the mechanism that turns “I should probably cut this” into something that happens whether or not you are watching.
A take-profit is the same idea in the other direction — an order that closes your position once it reaches a target.
An OCO bracket (“one cancels the other”) pairs a stop-loss and a take-profit around an open position. Whichever fills first cancels the other, so you cannot end up with a dangling order that opens a new position after you have already exited. See OCO and bracket orders explained for the full mechanics.
Stockade supports all five. Placing a hundred of them with fake money is how the vocabulary becomes muscle memory. The keyboard shortcuts help: B to buy, S to sell, F to flatten (close everything). When your hands know the exit key, hesitation stops being a factor.
Position sizing, with actual numbers
Here is the calculation that most beginners never do, and the single most useful thing to drill in a simulator.
Say you have a $100,000 account and you decide no single trade may lose more than 1% of it. That is $1,000 of risk per trade.
You want to buy a stock at $52.00. You look at the chart and decide that if it trades below $50.00, your idea was wrong. Your risk per share is $52.00 − $50.00 = $2.00.
Your position size is your dollar risk divided by your per-share risk: $1,000 ÷ $2.00 = 500 shares.
That is a $26,000 position (500 × $52.00) on a $100,000 account. Notice what happened: you did not pick the size first and then hope. The stop level and your risk limit produced it for you.
Now change one input. Same stock, same $52.00 entry, but you decide the level that invalidates your idea is $51.00 instead. Risk per share is $1.00, so the size becomes $1,000 ÷ $1.00 = 1,000 shares — a $52,000 position, twice as large, with the same $1,000 at risk. A tighter stop does not mean less risk; it means a bigger position and a higher chance of being stopped out by ordinary noise.
Run that arithmetic thirty times in a simulator and it becomes automatic. Learn it on a live account and each repetition has a price tag. Position sizing and the 1% rule covers the formula in full, including drawdown recovery math.
Reading the chart is a separate skill
The simulator’s charts are candlestick charts with a volume histogram underneath, each candle summarising one time period. The overlays available — EMA 9, EMA 20, EMA 50, plus VWAP, RSI, and MACD — are the common ones you will see referenced everywhere, and having them on screen while you trade is how you find out which ones you actually use versus which ones just make the chart look busy.
Most people start with six indicators and end with two. A simulator is where you can afford to discover that.
The Markets page carries 29 instruments: 14 equities, 8 crypto tokens, 3 forex pairs, and 4 futures (/NQ, /ES, /CL, /GC). The equities and tokens are invented tickers, not real companies or coins; only the forex pairs and futures use real-world names. They sit at very different price levels, which is worth practising against — sizing a forex pair quoted to four decimals is a different mental exercise from sizing an index future trading in the thousands, and misplacing the decimal point is a classic beginner mistake that costs nothing here.
The generated prices also do not reproduce real-world instrument personality: a single volatility model runs across every symbol. What you learn here is the arithmetic and the workflow.
For deliberate practice, the Chart Simulator replays a chart session candle by candle, so you step forward one bar at a time without knowing what comes next. The session is generated rather than pulled from an archive, so you cannot recognise the chart and cheat — and not knowing what the next candle does is the whole point. Live mode moves at 800ms ticks, closer to the real pace and the real pressure.
What the statistics tell you that your memory will not
Memory is a bad record-keeper for trading. You will remember the trade that ran 8% in your favour and forget the four small losses that paid for it.
The Analytics page keeps the record instead: equity curve, trade journal, win rate, profit factor, average win and average loss, max drawdown, and a time-of-day heatmap.
Two of those deserve explanation:
Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss. If your winning trades made $6,200 and your losers cost $4,000, your profit factor is 1.55 — you made $1.55 for every $1.00 you lost. Anything above 1.0 is net positive.
Win rate alone tells you almost nothing. A strategy that wins 35% of the time with an average win of $900 and an average loss of $300 produces, over 100 trades, (35 × $900) − (65 × $300) = $31,500 − $19,500 = $12,000. A strategy that wins 70% of the time with an average win of $200 and an average loss of $600 produces (70 × $200) − (30 × $600) = $14,000 − $18,000 = −$4,000. The higher win rate is the losing strategy. You cannot see that without keeping the numbers.
The time-of-day heatmap tends to produce the most uncomfortable discovery: many people find one specific stretch of the session accounts for most of their losses.
What a simulator cannot teach you
This part gets left out of most articles on the subject, and leaving it out is dishonest.
Simulated trading removes the emotional weight of real money, which is the hardest part of trading. Sitting through a $2,400 drawdown in virtual capital is mildly interesting. Sitting through a $2,400 drawdown in money you earned is a physical experience — and the discipline that held perfectly for three months on a simulator very often collapses in the first week of real trading. Rules do not fail because they were bad rules. They fail because following them costs something. A simulator cannot charge you that cost, so it cannot test whether you will pay it.
Fills in a simulator carry almost no friction. Your order fills at the price you see, instantly, in full; only stop and target exits slip, by the tick that crossed your level. Real orders face slippage — the gap between the price you expected and the price you got, which widens exactly when the market is moving fast and you most want to be filled. Real orders also face partial fills, where you ask for 500 shares and get 300. Neither appears at real scale here, so simulated results are systematically a little better than the same decisions would produce live.
Commissions, spreads, borrowing costs, and taxes are not modelled the way your specific broker will apply them. A strategy that clears a thin profit in a simulator can be a net loser once real costs land on it.
The price data is generated, so it contains no actual market behaviour. Stockade’s candles come from an algorithm, not from an exchange. That is fine for drilling mechanics — an order ticket does not care where the number came from — but a pattern that “works” here has been tested against arithmetic, not against a market. There are no earnings releases, no news shocks, none of the recurring structure traders actually try to exploit. Backtest-style conclusions drawn from generated data are worth nothing. Use the simulator to learn how to trade, not to discover what to trade.
The correct way to read a good simulator result is: “my mechanics are sound and my idea is not obviously broken.” Not: “this will work.”
How to use a simulator so it actually helps
Treat the virtual balance as if it were real. The moment you start taking $40,000 positions “to see what happens,” the practice stops being practice.
Trade one size and one setup until you have 40 or 50 entries in the journal, then look at the statistics rather than your recollection. Write down why you entered before you enter, not after you exit. And when you move to real money, cut your size until a full loss is genuinely boring — at that point you are no longer testing the strategy, you are testing yourself. The paper trading guide covers that transition in more detail.
Practice this on the simulator
Open the Trading Simulator, take the $100,000 virtual balance, and do one thing first: calculate the share count from your stop level before you enter, the way the arithmetic above works. Do that ten times, hitting F to flatten when your stop is reached rather than talking yourself into “one more candle.” Then check the trade journal on the Analytics page and compare your average loss to what you intended it to be. That single loop teaches more than a week of reading.