I recently discovered a great little website called Portfolio Link. It allows you to very easily create a fictitious stock portfolio to see how good of an investor (or day trader) you might be. However, it is unique from other similar sites in some ways.
I initially had my fake portfolio on Yahoo’s Finance. However, there is no way to prove your merit to others with such a portfolio, because, for ease and convenience, Yahoo, like many other sites, allows you to go back in time and make changes to your portfolio. Thus, I could go back to Google’s IPO date and make a large purchase of its stock and then claim I’m a financial genius.
Portfolio Link eliminates that possibility. Everyone starts with a fictitious $100,000 to buy stocks and bonds with. Trades are done in real time, only while the market is open. You can schedule future trades (just like a real portfolio) but you can’t actually buy 100 shares of Yahoo at 10:00pm EST. Anymore than you could in real life.
Second, your portfolios are completely public. See mine here. I’m hoping Portfolio Link creates a cool badge feature for bloggers and social networking purposes. I could see this being a way to eventually gauge the true effectiveness of your local stock investor. Have him play along with you for six months and see who is showing green before you start paying this big fees. If you are doing just as well as he is, or better, maybe you can save some cash and go with an online site to buy your stocks. Plus, you know they don’t have the partiality that your local investment broker might have.
Now, here’s my more immediate problem. I don’t want to buy more than 100 shares of anyone stock (diversification, right?). And I still have $76,000 of cash just sitting in my fake account - losing money due to inflation. Anyone got any good ideas where to put this cash? I’m getting plenty of stock spam email these days, but that’s not what I mean. I’m really trying to see if I have any clue to investing or not. I’m a huge Warren Buffett fan and I was one of the early readers of Motley Fool before they busted out of AOL jail and became so filthy rich that I don’t even know who they are anymore. So, I’m not completely naive, but I’m open to ideas. What good companies have I missed?
Posted in: Saving Money
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March 2nd, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Unfortunately, since I posted this, Portfolio Link has shut down and the domain name is for sale. If it pops back up somewhere else, I’ll be sure to post it here. Or if I find something similar (or better).