stock market and poker

i honestly do not know both, but i am learning.

thanks to online game sites where they allow you to have fake money to invest (for stocks) and fake chips to deal (for poker), i am learning step by step, by trial and error, what these two "games" are about. with poker though, there are times when i do not know how i am winning. i learn really by trial and error, with the fear that, will i know how to deal when this is for real? i dunno, but ive not played it in a while, coz when i started playing it months ago (its a facebook app, by the way), it makes me stay up till 3am just to keep on winning and get some chips (to which on most occasions i did succeed).

the other one is something i am doing for school right now. our homework is to do some research on our experience with trading stocks in Investopedia.com. its fun coz u get to have $100K to start with, and by mid October, you have to see how you've grown or lost. The fun part is that you can throw in your money to any real company on the market (ie: Amazon or Apple), and then see where your stocks go. the first one i bought was a company with the stock symbol APL, thinking it was Apple. so i checked the status of my stock today and it says it went up by 0.06% which isnt so bad right? come to think of it, it wasn't Apple Computers. it was a steel company. still, i had mark-up so im happy. so i went looking for Apple. at today's closing, it went down by -3.1. with a high price for the stock (around $175), i wasnt ready to throw in more money, so i bought just one and see where it goes by Monday. hoping that things will work better by monday, then i can throw in some more. this weekend, i could look up a couple more companies and try my luck. i mean, thats what the whole stock market paper is all about. researching and investing, and simply playing with the market.

its a fun way to learn. simulation is the next textbook really. =)