Pressing Buy feels like a single action. Underneath it are four decisions — which listing, how many shares, which order type, and when — and each one can quietly cost you money. A simulator hides most of those costs, so you need to know what they are before you rely on its numbers.
Many companies trade on more than one exchange, and the ticker tells you which one you are buying. On RiskStock, a Toronto Stock Exchange listing ends in .TO: SHOP is Shopify on the New York market, priced in US dollars; SHOP.TO is the same company on the TSX, priced in Canadian dollars. Same business, different price, different currency.
Some companies also have more than one class of share. Alphabet trades as GOOGL (with votes) and GOOG (without); Berkshire Hathaway’s A shares cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each while its B shares cost a few hundred. And some tickers that look like ordinary funds are leveraged or inverse products designed for one-day trading. Before you buy anything, pull it up in Stock Research and check that the name, exchange and type are what you expect.
At any moment a listed stock has two prices, not one. The bid is the highest price someone is currently willing to pay. The ask is the lowest price someone is currently willing to sell at. The gap between them is the spread, and it goes to the market makers who stand ready to trade with you.
If you buy immediately you pay the ask; if you sell immediately you receive the bid. So a position bought and sold straight away loses the spread even if the “price” never moved.
A market order says “fill this now, at whatever the best available price is.” During normal hours in a large stock, that is usually very close to the last price you saw. The fill is almost guaranteed; the price is not.
The gap between the price you expected and the price you got is called slippage. It is small in calm markets and in liquid stocks. It grows in the first minutes after the open, around big news, and in anything thinly traded, where your order can consume all the shares offered at one price and move on to the next, higher one.
A limit order sets the worst price you will accept. A buy limit at $48 fills only at $48 or lower; a sell limit at $55 fills only at $55 or higher. You get price protection — and give up the guarantee of a fill. If the stock never comes down to $48, you never buy it, and if it runs to $70 you watch from the side.
Limit orders are usually set for the day (they expire at the close) or “good ’til cancelled” (they sit until filled or cancelled, often up to a broker-set limit). A forgotten good-’til-cancelled order is a classic surprise: the price touches it weeks later, on news you have not read, and you own something you had stopped thinking about.
A stop order (often called a stop-loss) sits dormant until the price reaches a trigger, then becomes a market order. People use it to cap a loss automatically. Its weakness is that “becomes a market order” means it fills at the next available price — which, if the stock gaps, can be far below your trigger.
Neither is wrong; each trades one risk for another. The Manage Your Risk course covers when stops suit long-term investors and when they do not.
The NYSE, Nasdaq and TSX hold regular trading from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern time on business days. Some brokers offer extended-hours sessions before and after, but those have far fewer participants and wider spreads, and usually accept limit orders only.
At most real brokers, a market order placed on a Saturday waits until Monday’s open and fills at whatever the opening price is — which reflects everything that happened over the weekend. The RiskStock simulator fills it immediately at Friday’s last price. That is more generous than reality. It is fine for learning; just do not build a strategy around “buying on the weekend at Friday’s price”, because no real account lets you do that.
The simulator uses market orders at the last traded price, with no spread and no slippage. Three habits bring your practice closer to reality:
Educational purposes only; not financial advice. Paper trading is a simulation: no real money or securities are involved, and simulated results do not reflect the spreads, fees, currency conversion, taxes or emotions of real investing. Historical figures are illustrative and are not a forecast. Always do your own research and consult a licensed advisor.