Baffled by the stock market? Not know when to buy nor sell? Find the whole concept of an institutionalized gambling system in which wealthy individuals place stakes on a company’s fate without any true commitment to their purchase, meaning their support is really illusory and fosters a false belief of worth in CEOs who then go on to bankrupt their business and leave all their employees jobless following daring deals to please shareholders? Then Trading Doors may be the free educational game for you. Read on for more info below.
Trading Doorscollects together stock information on a number of real world companies, EA, Zynga, Pizza Hut, whathaveyou, and then allows you to invest in them with virtual currency. The whole things is taking place in a little private market and, of course, no real money is changing hands, but it introduces you to the idea of stock prices, how value is affected by real world events, and so on.
For instance, I invested heavily in Microsoft, buying 10,000 shares, because, I think, with the upcoming release of the new Surface tablet, their stock is about to gain in value. Hopefully, this would make my $148,000 investment worth substantially more, maybe as much as $250,000.
The aim of the game is to teach us how this system works and it does it relatively clearly, providing tool tips to explain different functions available to you.
It has some drawbacks, however, as an entirely virtual environment, your investment doesn’t affect the market. Nor does the investment of others in the game. If I were to go out and buy 10,000 shares in the real stock market, that purchase, that statement of confidence might have an effect on others. It might encourage others to buy which would, in turn, raise the cost of the stock. Buying in Trading Doors is done in a solitary vacuum.
It’s worth checking out, even just to spend $200,000 at Pizza Hut.