Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

How good is Wall Street Survivor for learning about investing?
While I've never used Wall Street Survivor, I took a look over the marketing materials and I've seen multiple similar contests run among investment interns also just out of college.  I see some good here and some bad. First off, I love interactive web-based tutorials.  I've used one to learn the syntax of a new programming language and I find the instant feedback and the ability to work at your own pace very useful.  The reviews seem to say that Wall Street Survivor is a good way to learn the basics of how trading stocks works and the lingo.  Also, it seems pretty fun which I've found helps a lot. Wall Street Survivor will hopefully teach you that there are many real stock markets and that they may have somewhat different prices and they likely take the real and timely data from a single market. Wall Street Survivor also frightens me.  The big problem that I see with interns running similar contests is that the market is extremely random over short to medium periods of time.  An intern can make an awful portfolio or even pick stocks at random and still win the contest.  These interns know a lot about the randomness in markets already so they don't believe they are trading geniuses because they won a contest, I'm not sure there is much to temper this view on this web-site. Also, while Wall Street Survivor teaches you about trading it doesn't appear to teach you about investing.  The website appears to encourage short term views and changing positions a lot and doesn't seem to simulate the full trading costs (including fees) that would eat away at the gains of a individual investor that trades that much.  It gives some help with longer term thinking like diversification, but also seems to encourage trading that makes Wall Street Survivor more money, but are likely detrimental to the user. I would say have fun with Wall Street Survivor. Let it teach you some things about trading, but don't give the site much if any money.  At the same time, pick up a copy of short book called "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" and start learning about investing at the same time.  Feel free to come back to Stack Exchange with questions along the way.