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Hmm - DS has discovered stocks. edited

Be aware that a strategy to maximize your chances of winning a stock investing game, is actually a terrible investing strategy.

You could get him an TSX or NYSE account and let him paper trade. Most major investment services and stock exchanges offer you an option to build a portfolio to monitor. You could build up a few industry or regional portfolios, a diversified one, and compare them against a broad spectrum index fund, like the one that tracks the S&P500.

If he does well with that, you could create a paper margin account and teach him simple puts and calls. I don't think it's anything a highly capable and motivated child like your son couldn't handle.

Yeah, so paper trading involves building a simulated portfolio and letting a computer program track the fluctuations of the portfolio contents. It's pretend, but with the feel of the analytics of real trading. Let me see if I can pull up a site I've used.

Here's the TSX service I've used. It isn't smart phone enabled, otherwise I'd walk you through the process in more detail. But, on the left hand side ribbon under "contact us", there should be a box that reads something like "sign into my account" or "create account". Once you log in, you can add equities by firm, industry, region, ETFs, bonds, etc.

http://www.tmx.com/en/trading/index.html

If your son likes this, I can recommend a ton of great experiments you could do.

Maybe youths should play an exchange-traded fund game (does one exist?), where the goal is to maximize the Sharpe ratio by choosing among asset classes such as domestic and foreign stocks and bonds. Most people should be investing in mutual funds or exchange-traded funds rather than individual stocks.
Of course, asset class investing may be too dull or abstract for children who may find it interesting to track household names such as Apple or Disney.

I dunno. I remember playing some internet-based games that used systems based on the stock market, and the best way to win turned out to be to band together to form a group of individuals who, collectively, controlled enough equity to manipulate the market prices. That strategy is a champ in real life, too.

You're welcome! Mine has a Canadian bias being the TSX, but the NYSE probably has a similar offering.

If you want a good read-aloud book, try Burton Malkel's "A Random Walk Down Wall Street". It might be a bit advanced, but the basic message of market efficiency is a good one to have access to. He offers a gentle, prose-based intro to portfolio theory.

The site www.boardgamegeek.com is an awesome site that reviews thousands of board games, gives ratings, photos, even videos of how to play, etc. I bet you can find just about any stock game on there (board games at least).