Ever wish you had like a hundred thousand dollars to open a stock portfolio, but realize, “Well, not this month, I gotta figure out how to both pay the rent AND buy drugs!”?

Well, guess what: Now you can buy drugs AND play the Market. Always in the search of new online time wasters, I have stumbled across Investopedia’s free stockmarket game. The game gives you 100,000 dollars of fake money, and then sets you to investing in their stock market (which is, of course tied to the real stock market). You can compete against others for the top ranking, and demonstrate your Warren Buffet-like skills in picking when to buy and when to sell to make yourself very rich. Or you can ignore all of that and just mess around, trying different investment strategies: Suppose you want to build a green portfolio to see if it would really work in a capitalist country (it probably won’t). You can do it here without actually investing a dime. Suppose you wanted to invest heavily in the military industrial complex, because you know you’ll make money but can’t stand the idea of actually helping them wipe out Iraq. You can do it on this sim.

The one reason I recommend this game to you all is not because I have turned capitalist, but for no other reason than you aren’t really investing, but it does teach you a lot about the system. Since it updates with the real market, you can see that you have to understand the system a LOT better than simply saying “capitalism is bad, socialism is good.” There are a number of reasons why capitalism is bad, and you can tease these reasons out by looking at this game. If you are a total idiot when it comes to market capitalism (as most socialists are, because they rely too heavily on normative Marxism and do not even participate in the real world), this will help you learn what you are critiquing.

And did I say best of all, it is totally FREE?! Well, there is it.

Click on this link to begin building your fake portfolio today