At its heart, Inspectd is a simple game: it shows you a chart of historical data on a random stock, asks you to bet on whether the stock’s price will rise or fall, and then immediately tells you if you won or lost — with another performance chart showing you why.
And maybe that instant gratification is what makes this game so addictive.
What surprised us most was how difficult it can be to go broke — at least on Inspectd’s virtual Wall Street. If that ever does happen, it sure will be fun to see how the business press explains it.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I just lost $60 million in fake money over the course of about nine minutes.
A couple of hours with this little toy should be mandatory before users are allowed to begin utilizing internet sites like *Etrade.
I am in a personal finance class right now and we played a game like this in class. I emailed this site to my instructor so I wouldn’t be surprised if we talk about it on Monday.
This game makes it seem like there is some skill to picking stocks based on their chart. While I am of course aware that “chartists” do exist, anyone who picks stocks purely by their charts is missing some of the most important aspects of stock picking- direction of an industry, direction of a company, who is in charge, debt, and a whole host of issues. Simply put, I would never invest in a company without reading over their quarterly reports and an industry analysis at a minimum. I honestly hope there aren’t people out there who invest with some random, chart based strategy.
I played off my gut, executing trades in a few seconds. Mostly guessing at the latest trend of the stock… if it was going down a bit, go down… if it was going up, go up.
$252,666.59 in profit over 55 trades
Thank you Mr. Sanders and Freakonomics. Soemthing else for my addictive personality. 15 trades, $95,505 profit
Is the point of this to show the validity of the stock market being a “random walk” or to give validity to technical analysis?
As a wise old NYSE specialist told me 33 years ago, “every ship at the bottom of the ocean has a chart”.
Very addictive…I think the point is to help people identify basic chart patterns and positions like resistance, support, triple tops and bottom, head and shoulders, etc. Users randomly guessing probably won’t get much out of this.