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Looking to experience the great American stock markets but want to test your ideas first before investing your hard-earned cash? Maybe you are completely new to investing and want to see what it is all about? Or are you a hard-core trading veteran looking to test your strategies and prove your investing know-how? Either way, the Zimulator offers you a risk-free environment where you can instantly see the results of your virtual actions based on real world results. In true ZeccoShare spirit, you'll also be able to see how other virtual traders are fairing.

So, whether you follow fundamental considerations, technical analysis, or simply your hunches, playing this game helps you to learn how your trades work out and build your trading savvy, all without risking a dime.

How to get in the game?

Getting started with the Zimulator is easy. Sign up with your private user name and password, and then choose your public screen name. That's it. You're in the game and all set to spend your virtual dollars on virtual trades. Play around on your own, or compete for top trader, it's up to you.

The Zecco Zimulator can be played with the same credentials in two locations: game.zecco.com and Facebook. So wherever you and your friends hang out, you're good to go.

What do I sign up for?

Using the Zimulator is 100% free and brings no further obligations. In fact, signing up for the Zimulator also gives you free access to all the other great features of the Free Trading Community available at Zecco.com. So if you wish, you can use the same credentials to participate in the investing forums, create an investing profile, track star investors' real performance, and much more.

How to make a virtual trade?

With your virtual dollars you can practice trading with various financial instruments in the Zimulator. All these are instruments that exist in the real Wall Street world too, to make your learnings most useful.

First of all, you can buy and sell stocks, as you may do for real in a brokerage account already. Have a go, and quickly find out what happens. Does your holding go up, or down? You will gain or lose accordingly, but only virtually of course. Want to learn more about the basics of stock trading? Check out Zecco's Stock Education section.

You can also trade options on stocks. An option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy (call) or sell (put) a stock at an agreed-upon price within a certain period or on a specific date. A stock option allows you to take advantage of moves you expect to happen in a stock price, with significant leverage.

For example, if you think a stock will go down in price, you can buy a put option on that stock, and still benefit. Or if you think the price of a stock will rise, you can buy a call option on that stock, and make much more money than if you just would have bought and held that stock. The risk of trading options is that you can also lose your money a lot faster. Which makes the Zimulator a perfect way to play around, without taking your chances with any of your real dollars. Pretty handy, right? Want to learn more about trading options? Check out Zecco's Options Education section.

Finally, you can buy or sell futures on commodities and a number of other financial instruments. Which allows you to benefit from the tremendous leverage that futures trading offers. For instance, you can make (or lose) a lot of money depending on whether crude oil goes up or down. Or in relation to the direction in which interest rates or currencies move. Or apply the same high leverage to your anticipation of stock market indices. Not for the faint of heart, but what the heck, it's virtual so it's risk-free.

Go ahead and make a trade or two right now. You'll learn immediately from the result. Learnings you will happily benefit from when you put your real money to work at Zecco Trading or elsewhere.

What do all these other terms mean?

Throughout your virtual experience you'll bump into terms that may need some additional explanation. Here's a glossary of the most common ones:

• Account - Virtual trading account with an initial balance of $100,000. Accounts can be used to virtually trade stock, options, and futures. You can create as many accounts as you like, and only your highest value account is used in any of your team totals.
• Call - A call option, or simply 'call', is a contract that gives the owner the right (not the obligation) to buy stock at a specific price (the strike price) at some time in the future. Click here for more details.
• Cash - The cash in an account that is not currently invested in any positions. Cash can be used for additional trades.
• Commission - The commission structure for trading in the game is very simple. Stock trades are $5. Options trades are $5, regardless of the number of contracts. Futures trades are $10, regardless of the number of contracts.
• Cost Basis - The amount of cash used for the initial purchase of a position. The gain or loss of the position is calculated against this initial cost.
• Equity - The current market value (positive or negative) of a position, or of all the positions together in an account. Equity value indicates what the proceeds would be if a position were immediately closed, excluding any commission or other transaction costs.
• Future – A future is a financial contract obligating the buyer to purchase an asset (or the seller to sell an asset), such as a physical commodity or a financial instrument, at a predetermined future date and price.
• Margin - The amount of cash (or value) that needs to be reserved in an account to cover for a futures position. Since futures positions have high volatility, margin is required to ensure solvency of the account.
• Naked - Naked refers to selling a position you do not currently own, or is not covered by an existing position. For example, you can be short a stock if you have borrowed the shares and are therefore ready to buy them back at any time. The game does not allow short stock positions, so you must buy to open and sell to close. We do allow naked put options, where you are effectively short a stock without having a position.
• Option – A stock option, or simply option, is a contract that gives the owner the right (not the obligation) to buy (e.g. call option) or sell (e.g. a put option) a stock at a specific price at some time in the future. Click here for more details.
• Period - The date at which a futures contract expires. All open positions in the contract need to be closed by this date.
• P/L - Profit or Loss, meaning the amount currently being gained or lost on a position, compared to the cost basis. Unrealized P/L applies to open positions, while realized P/L applies to closed positions. Realized P/L directly affects an account’s cash balance.
• Position (Closed) – Positions are closed by offsetting the initial trade. For example, to close the buy of a stock, you sell exactly the same amount of that stock. To close a short crude oil futures position, you buy exactly the same futures contract.
• Position (Open) - The start of a new position, by making a trade in an instrument for which you do not already hold an opposing position.
• Power - The amount of money that is available to open new futures positions. Power is calculated as the account value minus the margin requirements on open futures positions. In case power is negative no new futures positions can be opened.
• Put - A put option, or simply 'put', is a contract that gives the owner the right (not the obligation) to sell stock at a specific price (the strike price) at some time in the future. Click here for more details.
• Stock - A share of stock is essentially a small piece of a publicly traded company that can be traded openly on an exchange. Stocks are identified by their ticker symbol, generally one to five characters, and can be traded on exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASDAQ. Click here for more details.
• Symbol - The identification of the instrument being traded or held, generally expressed in one to five characters. For instance, GOOG is the symbol for Google stock. The game supports three kinds of symbols: stocks, options, and futures contracts.
• Value - The cash balance plus the equity value of positions in an account.

What are the rules of the game?

When you sign up for the Zimulator, you start with a virtual account containing $100,000 virtual dollars. You can choose to poke around on your own, or decide to focus on competing with other virtual traders. The Leaders tab shows who has the largest balance at any given time. Nice and simple, huh? Game on.

Sign up now and create as many accounts as you want. Just delete the accounts that somehow don't work out. Which means that your learnings are unlimited, and without consequences. In other words, what happens in the Zimulator stays in the Zimulator.

How do teams work?

Enjoy the game even more by starting or joining a team, and battle in the team competition too. The best-performing account from each individual on the team is used to calculate the team's average result. Up to 10 individual scores are averaged to arrive at the overall team score. Game on.

On the makers of Zimulator

The Zecco Zimulator is provided in partnership with Ptrades.com, which as an affiliate and partner of Zecco Holdings, Inc. is protected by the Zecco Terms of Service. Ptrades.com is a provider of entertainment websites where users can practice simulated trading, search for information about trading, and where advertisers of information, financial or other services offer themselves to the public for a fee. The Zecco Zimulator is an entertainment game with non-monetary accounts, and in no way provides advise, referral or financial service. Using the Zecco Zimulator does not imply any obligation to trade stock, options, futures or otherwise with real money. You may not see similar results in any real world trading as you experience on this site.