Hi Lauxa,
You might want to try out
Marketocracy.
It's a free investment simulation site where you can run your own fantasy mutual fund with $1,000,000 to start with.
I started around spring of last year - doing pretty much the same thing you want to do – investing only in companies that I personally know of and admire, and that provide products/services that I use every day.
I also wanted to get a baseline, just to see what would happen if I did absolutely zero market research and invested purely on blind intuition. So I bought 12 stocks and just held onto them, never tweaking any of my positions afterwards. And every week I got a status report emailed to me.
Although there were a lot of times over the past year where this "intuition fund" did horrible compared to the overall market, right now I'm up about 13%, with my fund's overall value being $1,134,540.86 as I write this. So I guess this fund did ok, but not anything outstanding.
Also, if you want, you can set up more than one fantasy investment fund. For example, you can set up a unique fund for...
- trying out value investing
- trying out day trading
- trying out selling-short on all the companies you dislike
- seeing what happens when you pick your stocks by throwing darts at a newspaper pinned to the wall.
- seeing what happens when you pick your stocks using only your gut-level intuition.
Personally, I only got as far as setting up that one “intuition fund” and stopped studying investing for the rest of last year. And I totally forgot that I wanted to set up that dartboard fund until I started writing this post. (Oh well...)
Anyways, last year I didn’t follow the market consistently enough yet or read enough investing books yet to actually want to get started on those other fantasy funds, where I’d test out buying and selling stocks weekly, based on the news headlines that week or by analyzing charts or by analyzing company fundamentals. My one intuition fund, using fake money, was stressful enough!
So yeah, whether you buy stocks and hold, or want to try out other investing strategies, it’s still probably a good idea to test things out first, just to get the experience. The only thing (I think) marketocracy can’t do yet is buy/sell options. But there are other sites out there that will let you simulate that too.
Hope this helps.