Closing Bell

You begin each run with $1,000,000 and thirty trading days. Click a company to open the trade panel, then Buy, Sell, Short or Cover. Read the analyst rating, the day's news and the price trend, place your trades, then hit Next Day to jump the market forward overnight. Your score is your net worth when the closing bell rings on the final day.

• Buy a stock you expect to rise; sell to take profits or cut losses
• Short a stock to profit when its price falls, then Cover to close
• Hold the blue-chip dividend payers to earn a small income each day
• Read the news feed and the interest-rate cycle before advancing the day
• Grow your $1,000,000 as much as possible before day 30

• Click any row in the market table to select that company
• Use the Buy / Sell / Short / Cover tabs, type a share count (or tap 25% / 50% / Max), then Confirm
• Press Next Day to advance the market one trading day
• Works with mouse or touch, desktop, tablet and phone

• Daily, every player trades the same seeded market each day; compete on the daily board
• Practice, a fresh random market every run for unlimited play and experimenting

• Buy companies rated Buy or Strong Buy that are trading below their trend, and avoid the Sells
• Sectors and the interest-rate cycle move whole groups of stocks overnight, a rate hike drags everything, a sector boom lifts a whole industry
• Shorting is your tool for a falling market; you can make money when prices drop
• Insider tips reliably predict tomorrow's move, but trading on one risks an SEC probe and a fine worth a fifth of your net worth, a real gamble
• Thin small-caps like PIO and ECHO can be cornered: own 50% and you can force a takeover at a 30% premium, but buying that much bids the price up as you go
• Sitting in cash is safe but goes nowhere, you have to take positions to beat the bell

Closing Bell descends from a long line of stock-market games, beginning with the simple buy-low sell-high programs that circulated as type-in listings for 1970s home computers — a market simulation was one of the few genuinely interesting things a machine with no graphics could do.

What makes the form endure is that it needs no opponent and no story. A price series that moves unpredictably, a limited amount of money and a clock are enough to produce real tension, because the player supplies the greed themselves. The good versions resist the temptation to make prices predictable: a pattern that can be learned turns the game into arithmetic, while noise that cannot be solved keeps every decision a judgement.

Closing Bell is an original, free browser stock-trading game with no download and no sign-up. It is a game of skill and nerve, not financial advice, the companies and markets are fictional. Play the shared Daily market to climb the leaderboard, or jump into Practice for endless runs.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.