How to Practice Investing Without Money: 4 Drills for Your First Month
You can practice investing for free with a spreadsheet or a simulator. Four drills, about a week each, for setting a target, buying, sitting through a drop and rebalancing before real money is involved.
Quick answer: Pick a realistic pretend balance, then use a spreadsheet or free simulator to rehearse what you would really do: set a target mix, buy, sit through a drop and rebalance. You need no money and no brokerage account, and a month is enough for most long-term beginners.
Most advice on this topic stops at “download a simulator.” What helps more is knowing which skill you are rehearsing, because clicking buy and watching a number move doesn’t teach you much by itself.
There is a real gap to close. In the FINRA Foundation’s latest investor survey, people with less than two years of experience averaged about 4 correct answers out of 11 on a basic investing quiz, against about 6 for people with ten or more years. On the index fund question, 30% answered correctly and 40% said they didn’t know (FINRA Foundation report, December 2025; 2024 survey). Those are people with real accounts.
The four drills below take about a week each. The numbers are made up for practice and none of this is a suggestion to buy anything.
Before you start: choose your pretend balance
Use the amount you might really invest in your first year. Simulators hand out far more: Schwab’s thinkorswim paperMoney gives you $100,000 of virtual buying power and Webull advertises unlimited virtual funds. If you might start with $3,000, then only let yourself use $3,000 of it and ignore the rest.
In the UK, do the drills in pounds and treat a Stocks & Shares ISA as your pretend account. The government page gives an allowance of up to £20,000 every tax year. That is a ceiling, not a target, so use your own number.
Drill 1: Write down a target mix
Before any trade, write two lines: what share of the pretend money goes into stocks, and what share goes somewhere steadier, like bonds. You will check yourself against it later. There is no right answer to find online, because the mix depends on when you need the money and how you react to losses.
The rest of this post uses an example of 60% stocks and 40% bonds on $3,000, so $1,800 and $1,200. It is the same split UseFinLit’s Rebalancing Schedule lesson uses, and it is an example, not a recommendation.
You are done when you can answer this out loud: “Why this mix, and when would I need this money?”
Drill 2: Place a buy and charge yourself for it
Now buy. If you use an S&P 500 index fund and a bond fund for your example, look up their prices today and write down the number of shares. Then make the fill less friendly than your screen, because real markets are. The SEC’s bulletin on order types says “the price at which a market order will be executed is not guaranteed,” while “a limit order is not guaranteed to execute” (Investor.gov, updated August 18, 2026).
Example calculation (illustrative, not a real cost figure): add a made-up 0.2% cost to every buy and every sell. Buying and later selling $1,800 costs you about $7.20 in total. That is small, but ten round trips cost $72, which is why frequent trading looks better on a simulator than it would in real life.
In a broker simulator you can try the order itself. Webull’s page lists limit, market, stop, stop-limit, OCO and trailing stop orders, and you can reset whenever you like. Place one limit order below the current price and see what happens when the price never comes down to it.
Drill 3: Sit through a pretend drop
This is the drill people skip, and the one a rising market will never teach you by accident. Pick a day and pretend your stocks just fell 20%.
Example calculation (illustrative): $1,800 in stocks becomes $1,440, a loss of $360. With the $1,200 in bonds unchanged, the total goes from $3,000 to $2,640, down 12%.
Now answer three questions in writing. Would you sell? Would you stop adding money? How many months of saving is $360 for you? That last one is the question that matters, since $360 of practice money feels like nothing and $360 of your rent money does not.
A pretend drop won’t make you calm in a real one. It does give you a note to reread if a real drop comes, and it may show you that your mix was too aggressive while changing it still costs nothing.
Drill 4: Rebalance once
Pretend a good year has passed. Stocks are up 30% and bonds haven’t moved.
Example calculation (illustrative): stocks are now $2,340 and bonds $1,200, $3,540 in total, so your mix has drifted to about 66/34. Back at 60/40, stocks should be $2,124. So you sell $216 of stocks and buy $216 of bonds.
Notice how it feels to sell the thing that went up. The SEC doesn’t name a single schedule, saying some experts advise rebalancing “every six or 12 months,” and that it “tends to work best when done relatively infrequently” (Investor.gov, Asset Allocation, opened November 4, 2026).
One thing a simulator hides: selling in a taxable account can create a tax bill, and new contributions can often fix the drift without a sale. In a 401(k) or IRA you can rebalance without tax on the sale.
Keep score against an index
Add one row to your notes: what a plain S&P 500 index fund did over the same weeks. If you pick individual stocks in practice, this is the comparison that tells you something. S&P’s scorecard found that 79% of active large-cap US funds trailed the S&P 500 in 2025 (S&P Dow Jones Indices, SPIVA U.S. Year-End 2025, March 3, 2026). That was one of the worst years in the study’s 25-year history, so don’t read it as the usual number. Still, those are full-time professionals, so a few lucky pretend weeks don’t prove much.
Which tool fits which drill
| Tool | Good for | Weak spot |
|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheet or notebook | Target mix, drop and rebalance drills | You look up every price yourself |
| Webull paperTrade (free) | Trying every order type | A trading app first, with real trading close by |
| Schwab thinkorswim paperMoney (free) | A full broker screen | Needs a Schwab account or 30-day Guest Pass; complex |
| UseFinLit | Learning the terms alongside simple trades | Market orders only |
TradingView and the Investopedia Simulator are other free options; our post on Investopedia Simulator alternatives sorts them by what you want to practice.
UseFinLit is our app, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. It has short lessons that match these drills, such as “What’s Your Risk Profile?” in the free Module 1, plus “How to Buy a Stock” in Module 2 and “Rebalancing Schedule” in Module 9, which are Premium. Its virtual portfolio has 100,000 in virtual cash at near-live prices, and when you trade you can write a reason that AI reviews against the lessons you have finished. But you can’t place a limit order, so Drill 2’s limit order needs a broker simulator. Everyone starts at 100,000, so you have to hold yourself to a smaller number, and the free plan gives you 3 energy for trades, refilling 1 every 5 hours. Nothing in it is real trading; for that you need a broker.
When to stop practicing
Stop once you can do all four drills without looking anything up. Practice money has a limit: it can’t make you feel a loss, and our paper trading post covers what it leaves out. Long-term investors rarely need more than a month or two.
If you move on to real money, start small, with money you won’t need for several years.
FAQ
Can I practice investing without opening a brokerage account?
Yes. A spreadsheet needs nothing at all, and tools like UseFinLit don’t require a brokerage account. Schwab’s paperMoney does need a Schwab account unless you use its 30-day Guest Pass.
How much pretend money should I use?
The amount you might really invest in your first year. A balance far above that makes big bets feel normal and teaches you little about managing your own money.
How long should I practice before investing real money?
For a long-term investor, a month or two is usually enough to run through these drills. If you plan to trade actively, UseFinLit’s Paper Trading lesson suggests judging a strategy only after 30 to 50 trades.
Can I practice without any app?
Yes. Write down your mix, look up the closing prices and keep your numbers in a notebook. You lose the live screen, which the first drill doesn’t need anyway.
Start With Your Risk Profile
“What’s Your Risk Profile?” is lesson 10 of UseFinLit’s free Module 1. It takes about a minute, ends with a short quiz and gives you something to base Drill 1 on.
Educational only, not financial advice.
Read Next
- Is Paper Trading Worth It?: what practice money teaches and what it can’t
- Top 5 Paper Trading Apps in 2026: simulators side by side
- What’s Your Risk Profile?: a starting point for your target mix
Author: Tuğçe Sezgin, Co-founder & Product Owner, UseFinLit.
Published: November 7, 2026 · Last updated: November 7, 2026
Sources:
- FINRA Investor Education Foundation, NFCS Investor Survey report (2024 survey), December 2025: finrafoundation.org
- U.S. SEC, Investor.gov, “Investor Bulletin: Understanding Order Types”, updated August 18, 2026: investor.gov
- U.S. SEC, Investor.gov, “Asset Allocation and Diversification”, opened November 4, 2026: investor.gov
- S&P Dow Jones Indices, SPIVA U.S. Year-End 2025, March 3, 2026: spglobal.com
- GOV.UK, “Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs): How ISAs work”, opened November 4, 2026: gov.uk
- Charles Schwab, thinkorswim paperMoney page, opened November 4, 2026: schwab.com
- Webull, paperTrade page, opened November 4, 2026: webull.com
- Charles Schwab, thinkorswim Guest Pass page, opened October 28, 2026: schwab.com
Frequently asked questions
Can I practice investing without opening a brokerage account?
Yes. A spreadsheet needs nothing at all, and tools like UseFinLit don't require a brokerage account. Schwab's paperMoney does need a Schwab account unless you use its 30-day Guest Pass.
How much pretend money should I use?
The amount you might really invest in your first year. A balance far above that makes big bets feel normal and teaches you little about managing your own money.
How long should I practice before investing real money?
For a long-term investor, a month or two is usually enough to run through these drills. If you plan to trade actively, UseFinLit's Paper Trading lesson suggests judging a strategy only after 30 to 50 trades.
Can I practice without any app?
Yes. Write down your mix, look up the closing prices and keep your numbers in a notebook. You lose the live screen, which the first drill doesn't need anyway.
