[1] This is accomplished by the manipulation of simulated money and investment positions that behave in a manner similar to the real markets.
For example, investors can create several different positions simultaneously to compare the performance and payoff characteristics between multiple strategies.
Investors can test these strategies with paper trading to avoid taking on excessive risk due to inexperience.
Financial market simulators allow users to generate a portfolio based on real stock entries and help them train with virtual currency.
The purpose behind such a system is to let a person practice with fantasy funds in a real-world context so they can determine whether or not they would gain money investing by themselves.
Most of the online stock simulators run on either C, C#, Java, JavaScript, ASP or PHP with a MySQL or PostgreSQL database.
Other applications that can be implemented with this software include popularity tracking and ranking from a set scale rather than an actual numerical value.