Fin24’s new product, Dashboard (www.fin24.com) is perfect for the novice who wants to know how to pick shares, how to interpret the figures in a portfolio and when to buy or sell, all using virtual money. So you can have the experience of exposure to the market without paying a cent.

It’s great fun. Once you’ve signed up, which is quick and easy, you can go through a questionnaire to determine what kind of investment style you have: growth, value, contrarian, income or GARP (growth at a reasonable price). It turns out I’m a value investor, like Benjamin Graham or Warren Buffett. Great!

Value investing favours good shares at great prices over great shares at good prices. It can also be defined as the strategy of selecting shares that trade for less than their intrinsic value, according to Fin24’s summary.

Once you’ve established what your investment style is, you can build your portfolio. Choose a name for your portfolio and compete with others on the leaderboard. I’m ‘Tradercat’ and I’m currently sitting at 803 out of 1533 other ‘investors’. That’s up from position 907 yesterday. I prefer a ‘buy and hold’ strategy, so short-term price movements don’t worry me all that much. But the competitor in me enjoys seeing positive movement on the leaderboard!

To keep an eye on your equities, add them to your watch list and keep an eye on price movement, as well as the website’s sentiment. See a smiley face? Your equity is probably a safe bet. Add the equity to your portfolio, selecting how many shares you’d like to purchase at the allotted price.

I bought 100 shares in Tiger brands (TBS) at an average cost of R241,77. Including R100 commission, the total cost comes to R24 177. The latest price is R243,68 a share, so the current value of my stock is R24 368. That’s a profit of R191, or 0,79% on the day. Tiger Brands accounts for 30,08% of my total portfolio, but because my other counters made a loss today, I’m actually R86 down for the day. Fortunately this is all play money at this stage.

The excitement of seeing your stocks ‘perform’ is a lot of fun – even if you have no interest in becoming a day trader and want to invest for the long term. Remember, too, that this isn’t trading in real time – data is delayed by about 15 minutes – but you get the general idea of what it feels like to have access to the market. You can also share comments with other Dashboard users, or on Twitter and Facebook.

SENS (Stock Exchange News Service) information is available so you can read up on any company news that might affect share price. The appointment of a new CEO, a director’s dealing in securities or other information will affect the market and you, as part of that market, can then decide how to react – buy, sell, hold? A nice function is the suggestions to downgrade or upgrade a stock, based on the strategy of a particular investment guru (like Peter Lynch, P/E/Growth Investor, or Warren Buffett, Patient Investor).

The product is still in beta or ‘test’ version, so that customers can provide feedback. “It’s a work in progress and we will roll out new features and functionality on a regular basis,” says Fin24 Dashboard product manager, Henem van Staden.

If you want to get more sophisticated you would need to purchase the Dashboard Premium product, which costs R99 a month and allows you to dig a bit deeper into the process, using advanced stock screening and discounted cash-flow valuation tools.

It’s an absolute joy to use. Get trading!

This article by Fiona Zerbst was first published in City Press