I'm about 4+ hours into the stock simulation and I've traded 5 mystery stocks. I recommend it if you're looking for an opportunity to build your knowledge of trading, technical analysis, chart, entry & exit skills from scratch. It's also a fun time-filler if you enjoy trading.

What to expect? You trade candlestick charts of historical data of stocks listed on US. stock exchanges. The mystery stocks are revealed to you only after you've traded them for a period of time. You trade with virtual money and if you're good, you should be able to grow your net worth over time. You also grow your capital by learning about various stock market & trading related concepts such as Moving Averages, Margin Loans and so on. The game starts you up with a Margin Loan which you need to invest, safeguard and build, or you run the risk of a Margin Call that ends your campaign run. The deeper you get into the campaign, your capital and technical analysis tool kit expands to include moving averages, MACD, volume and so on. You'll also unlock ETFs and crypto.

I've been looking for a simulation like this one for a while now. I found this through another influential day trader who mentioned it on their newsletter. I do think it can help you sharpen your skills, thought-process and trading discipline a bit. This is where the game shines. However, it's training utility drops sharply if you've already passed a day-trader beginner stage. For instance, if you've been relying on an IRL day-trading setup (indicators, trade & risk management), don't expect to be able to extend that setup to this simulation. Here you start from scratch and have limited technical customisation abilities. Ofc this is absolutely fair and I'm only mentioning this because I'd hope this review would help clarify what to expect.

In a nutshell, the intended target audience for the simulation are beginners. It's still fun to struggle with spotting and profiting from market cycles, huge price breakouts, building your net worth over time only to have to deal with the very real emotions having it disintegrate when markets crash.

Edit: I'm yet to get to a few of the more advanced features, such as trading automation. I hope that at that point the value of the game for me personally will grow. It'd help if a slightly quicker path was available.

Could be a fun little trading game but right now it's got a lot of little annoyances which add up and make me not enjoy spending all that much time in it.

Right off the start, the most basic thing such as zoom & pan isn't available and you have to unlock it. Fair I suppose, it's a game, it's gotta have challenges. So you unlock the brush which allows you to do that but now after every step/new candle it resets your view, and honestly the controls for it are really not that great. Just make them the same as they are in Trading View. Also after every step the slider on the left which determines your position size gets reset for no reason. There's also no way to change the time frame which is such a basic essential thing. There's no way to set position size based on a % and no way to set a stop loss or a take profit. No way to customize the chart and change candle/background colors. People trade in all kinds of different ways but it seems like the game is only catering to a specific type of trader. It's possible that some of these get resolved further down the line, I just couldn't be bothered to get that far.

I'd be happy to change this to a positive review if some of these get resolved because I do think the game has lots of potential especially considering the lack of competition but right now it feels really bare bones and frustrating. Using an analogy, it feels more like an arcade racing game than a sim.

+50 hours in.

I never leave reviews, but I would feel like a thief not to leave one for Trade Bots after the content I got.

...and I still have not covered much, but I only restarted twice...short of being wiped out.

This is an excellent trading simulation - truly a great practice/learning tool.

As you progress, you get more tools and trading flexibility (going short, stop loss, trailing stop, etc.). If you don't know what these terms mean, don't worry it will guide you with sufficient information. Also, the tools provided are not "bubble gum tools" but reflect realistic indicators used in real trading context.

This is really a good simulator to learn about trading because it let's you control the pace. This is way better then paper trading platform offered by brokers (i.e. Interactive Brokers, TD Ameritrade, etc.). Because you don't have you don't have to wait for the next day or week to see if your trade position worked or not and if you need to adjust. This quasi immediate feedback is key for understanding. It helps make sense of chart patterns, candlestick patterns, resistance area by allowing you to test your trading approach against real stock behaviour. It keeps you in the game in a much more direct way that day to day trading or swing trading (i.e. trading over longer period of time) would allow on a broker's platform.

Very importantly, it feels real enough (given it is based on real stocks) that you will be exposed to trading psychology. This in itself is key. If you loose your s***t here along with all your play money - Then you definitely need to hone your skills and your risk management.

If you loose it all. You start over. Fair enough - better than your real money.

I have been trading for a few years, nothing professional or anything like that, but am familiar with trading platform to recognise that Trade Bots hits in a area where few have been or are interested to go (when it comes to commercial trading platform).

Sure, there are few glitches and some improvement that could be done. But there is already way plenty on the table to learn a bunch. This being said, the guys are having regular updates, you can see they are interested in this game.

I hope down the road that there would be a place to add options trading - which is surely more complex, but this kind of environment would be ideal to learn to trade them.

Anyway, if you are interested in trading and honing your skills - I hope this helps tip the balance. I would recommend getting some additional content to test your trade strategies - anything basic on youtube can help (price action, chart patterns, etc.). Take some pieces and try to make sense out of the charts.

Cheers

As someone who has a Finance Minor from a university, and actively trades stocks and stock options for over 5 years but has been seeking an understanding at what trading on technical analysis really is.. I super want to recommend this to others but simply cannot. I really like the concept, and some elements of the execution but others I simply cannot get over.

Pros:
- you get a chance to really see how you could preform moving through a historical ticker
- you get exposure to the tools that technical traders use

Cons:
- the quizzes while a great item to include in theory, in practice sometimes ask questions where multiple answers are partly true but you have to guess which partial truth the developer had in their mind when they wrote the question.
- You cant see when quarterly earning are? In this simulation you are simply blindsided by sudden extreme volume, and subjected to wild swings from big investors trading outside of market hours on an event you should clearly know is coming up. Not a good comparison to the real world.
- are not notified when some major news releases on your ticker. even a simple "major event happened, positive/neutral/negative sentiment related" would really help bridge the gap between the real world and this level of simulation.

Somewhere in between:
- YouTube training material is another great in theory but poor in practice item where you sometimes get great content showcasing and supporting a given tool and other times are shown a stock bro trying to sell you on their STONKS only go up idea of an indicator.
- although I understand the reason, I would never trade a ticker that I knew literally nothing about, could be fixed by adding early on things like industry indicators so you can not only compare your ticker to whatever index its on the same exchange of, but also compare it to its peer group
- you can only see daily candles, I unfortunately know the root of this, in that people hide intra-day data behind absurd paywalls, but ultimately the space where technical analysts have their strongest sway in the market is while everyone is already running off the same news and reacting differently to it, would love to trade 5m candles instead of dailies.

Tl;dr: The tools that are here are really cool for playing and learning, but the way they're implemented just doesn't make this game worth it. It's also an extremely buggy game that crashes constantly.

Pros:
- Fun sandbox and lots of indicators to pour through
- Margin investing and options trading
- Fairly robust simulation

Cons:
- Crashes all the time
- Progress locked behind mandatory YouTube videos not made by the developer but randomly selected from YouTube. Some of them were set to private so you couldn't even watch them.
- Mandatory 5-question quiz following each video. You have to get all the questions correct to progress and the questions were often not covered in the video, but required a fairly in-depth understanding of the new topic.
- Timeline zooming has to be unlocked. After about a month of trading the timeline becomes impossible to see. There's no option to select time ranges, just an odd scrubbing experience.
- The UI and UX seemed ... off. Sometimes buttons would disappear. The unlock menu disappears after selecting an unlock so I found myself opening the menu (along with waiting for the UI animations) dozens of times at the beginning of a run.
- The game-like sense of progression focusing on your net worth is clunky and not fun.

First, the upside...

I came into this as a novice investor with a little experience looking to improve over all. I can honestly say that a single binge day of playing this was more enlightening to me as a trader than any YouTube video series as it connected all the dots I had learned on my own with all the other dots I didn't realize that I needed to learn. It made everything click into place while providing the safe yet hands on environment with real world information that one could really use to refine their knowledge base and strategy before going out into the wild. In that regard this simulator is practically a public service. Needless to say it is more than worth every penny to someone looking to improve as an investor and significantly less than the education one would require to get this much subject focused instruction in traditional academia.

Next, the trend reversal...

One must come into this simulator as they would a college course. It reminds me of getting my business degree so much I almost worry about my GPA from time to time playing it. However, if you are some sort of twisted geek such as I, who tends to watch multi-part hours long history documentaries from plucky Aussies on YouTube that would put everyone around you asleep, welcome home. This certainly isn't a casual trading sim. It is every bit as educational as it says and if that is what you are looking at it for then it is what you are looking for.

And now, the downside...

I'm just going to be forthcoming, it's crude. For me, on a system that ranks in the top 4% in the Steam hardware survey, the sim was clunky, laggy, and prone to frequent crashes late into very long charts. One was 50 years of Walmart, made bank but would have made so much more if "stop" actually stopped on time, even from the lowest sim speed, and during this total chart I experienced at least a half dozen crashes, each requiring the termination of multiple tasks in Task Manager, but I was bound and determined to find out what that mystery stock was which wound up being 50 years of Walmart. The problems were their worst during the last decade where, for a bit, I would see about one crash per year of the chart for a time. Fortunately, the sim persistently saves so I never lost progress.

Finally, the exit...

Like any good hammer or screw driver, it's a crude but effective tool. Those who approach it should be eager to learn. In my opinion, and being someone who has thoroughly explored an education in finance for this sort of thing, it is worth every bit of the $12. If you're looking for a trading game and not really looking to learn, look elsewhere. The Invisible Hand may be better suited to what you're looking for.

Considering this review starts on the upside, experiences a trend reversal, and exits on the downside, I suppose it comes up short.
Baddum tiss.

Love the Idea. Love the explanations. However, the entire experience is counter productive to learning. Removing unlocked graphs and vids, when you loose all your money, does not aid in anything...Other than making it a frustrating experience. Not being able to switch to a different "stock," when the poop hits the fan, is also counter productive. Furthermore, the feedback button does not work. Lastly, the game is buggy and on crash, which happens a lot, the game loses most progress. I cannot recommend it in its current state.

I got into technical analysis back in 2020 and really enjoy it over all especially with things like trading view. I had hoped to apply some of what I've learned over the years on this game; sadly this game is buggy, and the button to submit bug feedback is even broken.. The account starts at 100$ which seems a bit low to start out with unless you're leveraging every trade insanely, and it doesn't allow you to adjust a risk to reward ratio early on. All of that points to bad trading habits and it just doesn't feel well thought out. If you tried that in real life you'd immediately go broke.

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I love the idea of a game that teaches people things especially for more complicated subjects, but for that, the game must first work, and actually have the curriculum well thought out, and not just a wrapper around pre-existing web content. I can't recommend this game unfortunately

I don't like how the progress is implemented. It's kinda rogue like, which is absolutely annoying if you want to test and learn about trading instruments and stuff

While fundamental analysis will always beat technical analysis, this is a decent sim for paper trading.