Why I built a stock simulator with a real research stack

27 August 2026 · Brandon Taft

Every broker gives paper trading away. It costs them nothing and it is a funnel — you practice for a month, you get comfortable, you fund an account. The simulator is not the product. It never was.

So building another one would be pointless. What I actually wanted was the research half: the part where you can look at a company properly before you decide anything. That is what took two years.

What does "properly" mean

Most free tools will tell you a stock's P/E is 18. Almost none will tell you what that stock's P/E normally is. Those are completely different questions, and only the second one is useful.

A software company at 18x earnings might be the cheapest it has been in a decade. A utility at 18x might be the most expensive it has ever been. The number on its own says nothing. The number against the company's own history says quite a lot.

So the charts here draw a stock's ten-year average P/E, P/S and P/B as lines over the price — its own average, multiplied by what it earns or sells each year. When price sits below the line it is cheap by its own standard. Above it, expensive. That is one chart instead of an afternoon in a spreadsheet.

And the rest of it

A financial terminal on every ticker. A screener over about sixteen thousand US names with strategy backtesting. A trade journal that tags what you did and shows the win rate by tag, which is the only honest way to find out whether a strategy is working or you are remembering selectively. Personal finance, so net worth and budgets sit next to the portfolio rather than in a different app.

There is a social layer too — a feed, messages, an opt-in leaderboard. Not because investing needs to be a social network, but because the useful part of investing communities is watching what somebody who is good at this actually does, rather than reading what they say afterwards.

Where it honestly stands

It is free, it is in beta, and it is one person. Every position on it is simulated — real market prices, virtual money, no securities bought or sold. Where it is going is a real brokerage on a partner broker-dealer, and that is a long road with a lot of regulators on it.

What I would rather you judge it on is the tools. Open a chart, turn on the P/S value line, and look at something you already have an opinion about. If the chart tells you something you did not know, the rest of it is worth your time.