About StockCraft

StockCraft is a free investing education platform and paper-trading simulator, built for people who want to understand how investing works before risking real money.

Why this exists

Learning to invest has a genuinely awkward first step. The advice available to beginners tends to fall into two piles: material so simplified it doesn't prepare you for anything, or material aimed at people who already know the vocabulary. Meanwhile, the apps that make it easy to start are often designed to encourage frequent trading, which is roughly the opposite of what most beginners should be doing.

The gap is practice. Nobody expects to learn to drive by reading about driving. But with money, the standard path is to read a few articles and then start with real savings on the line — and the first real lesson usually arrives as a loss.

StockCraft was built to fill that gap: a place to practice the mechanics, make your early mistakes for free, and learn the concepts in plain English along the way.

What StockCraft actually does

A paper-trading simulator

You start with $10,000 in simulated money and can buy and sell stocks, ETFs, crypto, global markets, and options. Nothing is real — no deposits, no brokerage account, no risk. The point is to make the process familiar, and to let you discover how you personally react when a position drops.

Plain-English education

Our free guides cover the fundamentals: how the market works, the difference between stocks and ETFs, compound growth, dividends, diversification, and an honest treatment of options. Inside the app, Investing 101 walks through the same material lesson by lesson, alongside guides to crypto and global markets.

Free financial tools

Compound growth and dividend reinvestment calculators, position sizing, an options profit/loss visualizer, plus budgeting and debt payoff tools — because investing decisions don't happen in isolation from the rest of your finances.

A built-in Trading Coach

An offline coach that answers common questions about investing concepts in plain language, covering topics from candlestick patterns to taxes on gains. It runs entirely in your browser with no account required.

What StockCraft is not

Our approach to content

A lot of investing content is written to make trading sound exciting, because excitement drives engagement. We've deliberately gone the other way. Our guides say plainly that most people are best served by boring, diversified, long-term investing, that options are risky and most retail traders lose money on them, and that the biggest threat to your returns is usually your own behavior.

That's a less thrilling pitch. We think it's the honest one, and it's the standard we hold our content to.

How StockCraft makes money

StockCraft is free to use, with no subscriptions and no paywalls. It's supported in two ways, and we'd rather state them plainly than bury them:

• Advertising. We display ads through Google AdSense.
• Affiliate links. Some links to brokerages, banks, and financial products earn us a commission if you sign up — at no additional cost to you. Bonus amounts and offer terms are set by those companies and can change.

Affiliate revenue creates an obvious potential conflict of interest, so our rule is simple: we don't recommend a product because it pays us, and we present multiple options rather than pushing one. If a recommendation ever seems inconsistent with the honest tone of our educational content, we'd genuinely like to hear about it — tell us.

Your personal data isn't part of the business model. Your practice portfolio, budget entries, and other in-app data stay in your browser on your device. We don't have accounts, and we don't sell user data.

Who it's for

Complete beginners who've never bought a share. People who've opened a brokerage account and felt overwhelmed. Anyone curious about options who'd sensibly like to understand them before putting money at risk. Students, and anyone who wants to build financial confidence without an expensive first lesson.