Trade the Crash

Trade the Crash is an educational trading simulator inspired by the 2000–2003 dot-com crash. You start with $50,000 and choose a career path before trading fictionalized simulation instruments across a market timeline of 818 days. There is no rewind or manual saving, and if your account reaches zero, the run ends.

You pay $5,000 in monthly living expenses for rent, groceries and bills. Over three years, those expenses total $180,000 before you make any money back from the market. The technology-heavy market loses most of its peak value, with false bottoms and dead-cat bounces along the way. You decide which rallies signal a recovery and which do not.

Career paths and instruments

You can trade 63 simulation instruments across five career paths. The company names, company-specific news and stock symbols are fictional, while the instruments present historical market behavior through a fictionalized simulation. The career paths are:

• Tech Trader: fictional technology companies and broad market funds.
• Blue Chip Analyst: fictional industrial, consumer, healthcare, energy and financial companies.
• Futures Trader: crude oil, gold, silver, natural gas, corn, wheat and more.
• Forex Trader: major currency pairs.
• Bond Trader: short-, medium- and long-duration government bonds.

Study Hall lessons

The integrated Study Hall contains 86 lessons that you can apply immediately on a live simulation chart. Topics include:

• Chart reading: candlesticks, timeframes, support and resistance, volume and trends.
• Patterns: Head and Shoulders, Cup and Handle, Double Top/Bottom, Flags, Wedges, Triangles and more.
• Indicators: RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, ATR, ADX, Stochastic, OBV, CCI, Williams %R and Moving Averages.
• Order types: Market, Limit, Stop, Stop-Limit, Stop Loss and Take Profit.
• Trading psychology: Fear, Greed, FOMO, Loss Aversion, Revenge Trading, Anchoring and Herd Mentality.
• Risk management: position sizing, the bid-ask spread, P&L and drawdown.
• Elliott Wave Theory: a 10-lesson course, from the basics to applying wave analysis during a market crash.
• Strategies: Day Trading, Swing Trading, Trend Following, Mean Reversion and Event-Driven.
• History: the dot-com bubble, the 2000 market peak, the decline, policy responses and the recovery.

Trading tools and rules

Trades use cash for most assets, with broker-style forex sizing and margin limits. The simulation also includes commissions, Stop Loss and Take Profit orders, and a drawing toolkit with trend lines, channels, Fibonacci retracements, position markers and a measure tool. You can view each instrument on 1H, 4H, 1D, 1W and 1M charts.

Steam Leaderboards rank returns through June 2, 2003. The game is an educational simulation, not real-money trading, financial advice or a trading signal; its results do not predict real-market performance.