Get in-depth financial data, articles, email alerts and track / manage your personal portfolio on FT.com…

Register FREE at FT.com

Xearn.com - you can see how you compare with others and what they pick as well.

Try, you can also ask a lot of questions on the site and get quick answers for the sites community

I think it’s great that you’re getting into stock investing. And certainly, it’s always great to practice before taking the plunge fully.

However, be aware that paper trading with no money and actually investing with your own real money are two different things. They may seem like they are the same, but many first-time investors get overcome by their emotions when they first start investing with their own money, even if they’ve practiced first with paper trading.

When you’re paper trading, your emotions aren’t in full force since you have nothing to lose except maybe some bragging rights if “your” stocks go down. However, if you’ve got real money on the line, you’ll find that you start valuing things differently and your emotions get in the way a lot more frequently.

You might be “afraid to lose” so you sell too quickly. Or if it’s your own money, you might see a great company at a great bargain, but you’re afraid to actually buy the stock because you don’t want to lose your money.

The best way to become a better investor is to actually get in the game. That way, you start to learn how to invest with your emotions in full force, and you learn how to check them at the door when following your investment strategy.

You can open a brokerage account with very little money, and start investing. Now, again, I would take some time to learn what your investment strategy should be (the one that fits your risk tolerance, etc.).

I’m a big advocate of value investing (finding the right companies to invest in, buying them at the right prices, and only selling when they become overvalued…). There are a lot of great resources out there to get started in value investing (I have a number of my favorites on my website…)

Hope this helps, and good luck!

the best by far is theupdown.com for the beginner, it allows for easy communication with groups and individual players. also the motleyfool caps section is agreat way to start both are free. If you join theupdown, join the group “going global’ and we would be happy to assist you getting started. I am rabidtigerfan on both sites….Goodluck

The Fantasy Stock Exchange on Facebook works for me even though I don’t really trade on it. I bought some stocks a few months back and its doing well. The application just got a facelift with some charts and new features about a month ago.

Options Express is a brokerage that will let you create a paper trading account for free. This brokerage is a discount brokerage that trades just about everything; stocks, bonds, options, mutual funds, etc. The website is OptionsExpress.com.

Yes;
Try Barchart.com. They are direct ECN, 50K practice accounts for everything from Currencies, Stocks, Futures, Commodities, Etc. They don’t trade against you like Ameritrade or other Independents.

Website is here: