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Best Paper Trading Accounts
Online stock brokers offering best paper trading accounts in 2019. Best demo, virtual money account, free simulator, practice trading brokerage firms.
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Broker Paper Trading Accounts
Investing or trading in the stock market is a skill like any other. Without mastering this skill it’s very hard to be successful in making money
trading equities and options, or trading on forex and futures markets. Learning it takes time and practice and you don’t want to risk you hard-earned money
while doing that.
Fortunately, there are brokerage firms that offer their customers a virtual, simulated environment (also called paper trading), where users could
trade with "virtual” money, without putting real money at risk. This is, probably, the best way to learn how to trade stocks, ETFs, mutual funds,
options, and futures. You could test and perfect your trading skills without losing a dime.
We, obviously, can't review all brokerage companies offering free virtual trading in a single article. Below we'll talk about the best paper trading
account on the market offered by TD Ameritrade.
TD Ameritrade Free Paper Trading
TD Ameritrade's thinkorswim application offers paperMoney, a simulated trading account that allows customers to practice trading on the thinkorswim platform. Thinkorswim
is an advanced system geared towards sophisticated traders, and conveniently has no active trader requirement. It does take some time to learn the platform. In addition
to the usual selection of securities, such as stocks, options, mutual funds and ETF's, investors can also trade forex and futures. Customers who are interested in these
products can practice trading them before committing real money. Advanced order types are also available on the platform, allowing users to practice complex order
strategies before using them in real trades.
Charting tools in thinkorswim are quite advanced. Order entry is possible by right-clicking on the mouse. There are pattern and drawing tools such as ascending triangles and regression lines. Price and time axes can be customized. Users can manipulate various features, such as the aggregation period.
Within the thinkorswim platform there is a "support/chat" button where customer service is available from 6 am to 6 pm CST. Chat rooms are available for customers to communicate with each other, which gives a community feel to the application.
In line with the importance of social media nowadays, thinkorswim lets users share a chart via Facebook, e-mail, Twitter, and MyTrade.
One nice technical feature that TD Ameritrade has implemented in thinkorswim is for the desktop application and mobile app to synch to the most recent symbol viewed.
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Best Paper Trading Account Summary
While most brokers don't offer paper trading capability, TD Ameritrade does. New investors learning the ropes would be wise to take advantage of
the broker's free simulated trading services.
After logging in, users are brought to the TD Ameritrade IRA account overview page which looks like this:
This is one of the best designed and easiest to use websites among brokerage firms.
In addition to a website, clients could also trade from the company's advanced trading platform called called Thinkorswim. Thinkorswim’s user interface
has a lot of features which prove to be useful to the day trader but mostly clutter the screen of a passive investor.
In order to see the performance of the account, the user must click the “Positions” subtitle, which will take them to a new screen as seen below.
This page proves to be the most useful as it shows what price the stocks were purchased, what price they are currently trading at, and the
gains of each stock.
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Special note should be made for the way Thinkorswim handles multiple accounts, as mentioned earlier in this review. Each account is associated
with a single username, which means that it is very easy to accidentally deposit or withdraw funds from the wrong account. For example, when
adding funds to an IRA account that is linked to a taxable brokerage account, the user must first select the username associated with the IRA
account in the drop down menu at the top of the screen. Once the proper account is selected, then all subsequent actions such as adding or
withdrawing funds, will affect that account. Unfortunately the user interface does not do a very good job of indicating which account is currently
selected.
The Thinkorswim platform can be downloaded by opening an account at Thinkorswim, logging in, and navigating to "Trading Tools -> thinkorswim"
in the main menu.
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