You shouldn't have to lose real money to learn investing

25 June 2026

Real market data. Fake money. Practice mode for investing.

I learned investing the expensive way.

I bought the hype. Followed random advice online. Held losing stocks because I had no system.

Once, I bought Beyond Meat after listening to a podcast. 🤦‍♂️

It nearly went to zero.

For a while, I thought I was just bad at investing.

The real problem seems simpler: I never had a safe place to practice.

With most skills, you try, fail, cry, learn, and try again.

With investing, every mistake costs real money (uh, the pain). You do not get enough repetition to build your own workable system without paying for every lesson.

The existing tools did not solve this for me.

Paper trading felt fake. Serious backtesting required data, code, and a lot of work.

So my cofounder Ian and I are building TickerTown.

It is a retro-looking, 8-bit investing game with real market data, real math, and fake money.

You can choose an investing strategy (or build your own, with some limitation in v1), backtest it across years of market history (no code needed), then play it out without risking a cent.

Put it live with play money. Watch how it performs. No code needed.

Why we are building this

• People should be able to learn investing without burning their savings.
• Beginners get a safe place to practice.
• Experienced investors get somewhere to test the wild ideas they would/should never try with real money.

It is still early.

We are aiming for a private beta around August, starting with US stocks. The backtests are a starting point, not a crystal ball.

Join the early list here → preview.tickertown.ai

Founding players will help us test the product first, then get access to the private beta.

Mostly, we are building the practice mode for investing that we wish we had.