Stock Market Game — ChartZero

Can investors master chart patterns just by playing stock market games?

What led to the creation of the ChartZero stock market game was reading a Scientific American article about transcranial stimulation. In that article, author R. Douglas Fields explained how one of the most difficult tasks facing the Air Force is the intense training involved in teaching drone pilots to be able to look at a complex radar image, and pick out targets.

One might ask, "Couldn't a computer just spot targets from these images?" It turns out the answer is no; you need a human.

Simply put, no computer can parse through these patterns and make a reliable up/down judgment as to what is a target. But the amazing human brain can.

As theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, author of "The Future of the Mind," described in a recent television interview, "Realize that what sits on your shoulders is the most complex object in the known universe."

Asked about using computers to essentially create a fake brain, i.e. a virtual computer-based system to reach the same computational power as the human brain, Kaku answered, "We would have to build a computer the size of a city block, cooled by a river, and energized by a nuclear power plant, to mimic the computational power of your brain — which does it for 20 watts."

Where computers fail when it comes to identifying targets from those radar images, the astounding human brain can be trained to be able to study a radar image and reliably pick out the patterns that point to something being a target. So the only answer for the Air Force is to train human pilots through countless hours of video simulators — effectively playing a game repeatedly — during which the trainees are shown real image data from the past, and then asked to make a prediction. The trainee sometimes identifies a target correctly, and sometimes not, learning the answer from the simulation game after they have made their prediction. By repetitively going through this exercise over and over again, their brains slowly begin to learn the patterns.

According to the Scientific American article, the biggest bottleneck for the Air Force in deploying new drones is the shortage of trained pilots, given that the number of training sessions necessary before the brain is able to reliably pick out targets, is extremely high.

This got us to thinking about patterns in the stock market, as expressed in charts. Patterns like the 50-day moving average crossing the 200-day moving average and then diverging; patterns like increasing levels of volume during a strong stock move; patterns like the slope of the Relative Strength Index (RSI) at the same time other patterns appear. And countless others, potentially too complex for a computer to ever be able to absorb the way a human brain can.

And we wondered: presented with training sessions consisting of historical charts, and asked to make an up/down prediction for where a stock went next, can the human brain be trained to zero in on the patterns that point to a stock about to climb (or fall) and make predictions more reliable than a coin toss?

The ChartZero stock market game turns these training sessions into a fun exercise through gameplay, presenting users with a random chart from within the S&P 500 components at a random point in time in history, without axis labels and without displaying any data or labeling that would reveal which stock is being shown. Users are then asked to predict: two weeks later, was the stock higher or lower?

Just like a drone pilot will pass over any target they are not sure about, when playing the ChartZero stock market game users are also given the option to pass. In real life, investors are not forced to swing at every pitch and nobody counts strikes, so we structured the game the same way. But at the same time, don’t be afraid to make mistakes; the whole idea is to make mistakes. We'll keep track for you of the percentage you predicted correctly, and you can see your ability grow over time.

At best, playing the ChartZero game will train your brain to zero in on patterns and be able to predict whether a given chart represents a stock poised to go higher or lower. At worst, it is still a fun and free stock market game to play. So sit back, relax, and enjoy ChartZero.com, a stock market game that might just train your brain to master chart patterns of stocks.

Click here to see your first ChartZero stock chart and predict what the stock does next »