Purchasing Stocks
Now that you're familiar with your trading account interface, let's go ahead and execute your first stock purchase. We will buy 100 shares of a well-known American corporation, Walmart Inc. (WMT), using the following steps.
After logging into your Simulator account, click on the "Trade" tab on the top of the screen and select the "Stocks" section.
Enter in ‘WMT' in the Symbol field, ‘100' in the Quantity field, and 'Good Until Canceled' in the Duration field, then leaving all other fields at their default settings, as shown here:
Ignore all the other settings and click Preview Order to proceed to the order confirmation screen, then press Submit Order:
Note: The stock price and all associated numbers in the screenshot above may be different than those below since they're always changing due to the inherent volatility of the stock market.
Take a minute to review the details of your order. As you can see, you are buying 100 shares of WMT at its market price. Your transaction type is Buy Market Order (Buy MO), which means you want to buy shares of WMT at the current market price. In order to simulate a real online trade, your play money account will be "charged" a commission of $19.99 per trade. Brokerage firms commonly charge commissions for the service of executing trades.
Click on the Submit Order button to confirm your purchase of 100 WMT shares. Your order is now confirmed and will be filled at the first available opportunity.
Order Confirmation
After submitting your order, you'll see a page that confirms that your order has been successfully accepted by the stock simulator. Please note that if you have made your order outside normal market hours (9:30 am – 4:00 pm Eastern Time), your order will be filled at the start of the next trading day. If you place the order during regular business hours, you'll see WMT in your portfolio within 20 minutes.
If you need more ideas on other stocks to pick, we recommend subscribing to our newsletter for more company news alerts.
If you do not want to receive trade confirmation emails after each trade, you can toggle off these settings in the 'Account' page.
Now that you've purchased your first stock, let's review the details of your holdings in the next section.