Gamification In Stock Trading: What You Need To Know To Stand Out From The Rest

With today's mobile devices, one can do so much more than the mere basics. Your mobile phone allows you to monitor your funds and set up finance management tools to help you save for a home, a new vehicle, or a dream vacation.

Backed by lightspeed technological growth, the mobile world has also been consumed by games that go far beyond fan favorites, such as Coin Master or Arena of Valor. Gamification mechanics are now being used to make non-gaming tasks in various industries easier and much more fun to undertake.

Gamification is the application of game elements and techniques into non-gaming environments to provide a more enjoyable and engaging customer experience.

This usually includes setting goals, keeping track of progress, and completing objectives to win rewards such as financial bonuses, vouchers, and different kinds of large and small gifts. Gamification apps often feature a point system, leaderboards, and badges to motivate customers to take specific tasks, such as saving money, carefully planning their budgets, making wiser trading decisions, and much more.

Gamification positively influences the following aspects:

• Customer loyalty and fulfillment
• User retention and acquisition
• Brand awareness

Regular games can be great if you're looking to kill some time waiting at the dentist, but if you're serious about stock trading, you'd likely want something that can help you grow as a trader, as well as keep you entertained.

What Is Investment Gamification?

In the realm of investment, Gamification includes the implementation of game features to encourage personal growth through immersive experiences. Game-like elements used by marketers can be packaged in many different ways. As mentioned above, they include point systems, badges, and leaderboards, as well as other, more in-depth reward systems.

Other crucial elements of a well-rounded gamification approach can include eye-pleasing app designs, immersive presentation of information and push notifications, trading news stories, and nudging investors to apply techniques used by popular traders.

These elements are incorporated by businesses to reduce friction and increase convenience. They help with share fractionalization and zero-commission trading, increase the ease of fund transfers, and make opening an account as easy and enjoyable as possible.

From a marketing standpoint, ads that have the potential to elevate a person's social status, bonuses given for opening an account, as well as other endorphin-inducing incentives are all part of the magic of Gamification and are excellent tools for driving self-directed trading (SDT).

Stockmarket Game: Definition

Also known as a stock market simulator, a stock market game is a mobile app that is designed to emulate trading and investing in the stock market in a virtual environment. The goal here is to teach people about the dos and don'ts of the process while gaining a deeper understanding of statistics.

If you're a trader who is just starting, it might seem overwhelming at first. Getting bombarded by the information presented by all the indicators and graphs, as well as industry-specific terms and concepts such as DMA, RSI, and Bollinger bands, can push you away just like that.

For people who climb this ladder, at first, stock trading can be extremely exciting. However, the thrill can also fade as it becomes routine.

And that is where Gamification comes in.

Gamification heats things by adding gaming elements to the repetitive and mundane environment of trading. The trader's journey can be greatly enhanced by various features and incentives that put him or her in a much better position to make a profit.

The average attention span of a modern mobile phone user is said to be a mere few seconds. The moment we open our eyes in the morning, we open our phones and get showered by all kinds of messages and notifications, from social media posts of friends to messaging app notifications to promotional materials and tons of marketing email spam.

Various industries globally are fighting for the attention of customers, and the competition is growing at lightning speed.

The startup companies of today are much like social media posts — solving a particular problem with hundreds of others simultaneously. This is, however, in many cases necessary to make your app stand out from the competition, as we all have access to more or less the same information.

Hindrances are no longer just due to technology, as innovation, design, and execution are also key ingredients to a successful app, among other things.

To create a successful Gamification app, you need to smartly combine the abovementioned elements, and you will be on the road to trading kingship in no time.

In the following section, we'll go through some techniques you can use to gamify your stock trading or finance app.

Some key features needed to gamify such an app include:

• The real money to win, in-game points that can be claimed as real money

• Social group challenges and the ability to create a portfolio with high return rates or predict stocks.

• Portfolio challenges for people with daily real money winners or groups of winners

• AI-led recognitions on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis

• Achievement badges and unlockable competition levels

• Social interaction between traders, social media sharing, and discussions

• Leaderboards & Scoreboards

• Engaging quizzes

• Special avatars to boost interactive engagement

• Team vs team challenges and tournaments

Many more gamified features can be added to a trading app to make it more engaging and thus make traders want to return for more. The strategies you employ would largely depend on your goals, customer demographics, target customer base, as well as budget constraints. In the following section, we'll take a deeper look into some of the best Gamification techniques that have helped thousands of businesses find success.

Now, let us explore 12 of the most potent gamification ideas that you can implement to create a successful trading app.

1. Personalization

By smartly using precious client data, you can offer personalized financial goals, strategies, challenges, achievements, online courses, educational videos, blogs, and other valuable content relevant to each customer.

2. Avatars

Giving people the option to choose, upload, and unlock specially customized avatars is a social element in the world of video games, with veteran status. In the trading industry, avatars can help elevate what is usually seen as mundane processes to a more fun and exciting state.

3. "Tilting" Prevention

The term 'titling' is used in the gaming community to describe wild behavior that translates to negative results — e.g., a poker player going double or nothing with a bad hand or a pinball enthusiast tilting the machine.

No matter what trading solution you have chosen, it should be designed with anti-tilting in mind so that people won't make poor financial decisions. Various applications with gamification elements use bots powered by artificial intelligence highly trained to spot tilting behavior and send automated messages to people before they've dug themselves into a hole.

4. Teamplay

Seeing what the money-trading applications of today are doing to create a sense of community can only inspire businesses to follow suit. Apps with strong gamification mechanics are proof that customers are excited about the chance to connect with friends and family.

Giving people the option to interact, join forces in challenges, and engage in healthy competition against one another for rewards, can create a much more engaging and immersive customer experience for everyone.

5. Customization

Gamification allows you to customize the customer experience in great detail.

This has been observed for decades in video games; people spend lots of time building their online persona and even spend money on virtual clothing to suit their tastes.

A study by professor Nadine Bol and a team of researchers revealed the reasons for this behavior. According to the study, people tend to immerse themselves more in an experience if they are given a certain amount of control and autonomy.

Your trading site or app can also take advantage of this. By adding additional options to choose background elements, colors, night and day modes (for easy-on-the-eyes experiences), and other customization options, you can give people an experience worth sticking around for.

6. Progress Bars

One of the most crucial elements of a successful trading app is the ability to help people make wise financial decisions.

That is why it is essential to help customers get through their tasks and be transparent about their progress. Progress bars are a great way to achieve this, but that's not all they can do.

This ageless tool can help customers stay motivated by giving them a dopamine kick every time they see the bar moving closer to their end goal. In turn, this translates into retention, loyalty, satisfaction, and, ultimately, revenue.

When it comes down to helping people be smart about their finances, you should give them a specific result. For example, you can show users how much money they can get in return for investment.

7. Points, Badges, Rewards

Reward systems are a great way to attract and retain customers. By providing incentives for effort, a trading app can deliver a better customer experience while boosting return on investment.

Hence, trading apps and sites can significantly benefit from gamified elements like points, badges, and other pride-stimulating techniques.

You can, for example, hold a prize drawing for the most active users, encouraging them to engage with the app more often.

8. Gamified educational content

To successfully raise client awareness about the ins and outs of trading, it is vital to gamify educational content. Businesses can implement various techniques that involve quizzes, puzzles, videos, and games to foster financial literacy while improving customer engagement.

For example, your app can provide educational content and a point system allowing people to win rewards such as movies, music tracks, tickets to social events, and so on.

9. Social Media

To improve customer engagement and keep churn to a minimum, trading businesses can give people the ability to share their accomplishments, favorite features, and other fun in-app content via social media sites.

In addition, this type of Gamification helps companies attract new customers and increase awareness.

For example, an app can encourage people to share gifts and money with their loved ones. Users can also receive personalized rewards based on certain activities.

10. Animations and interactions

Successful businesses understand the value of investing in product authenticity. This can include product surface texture, sounds, smells, shapes, etc. For example, have you noticed that all KFC restaurants smell the same? This is done by design.

Although such subtleties often go unnoticed, they bring great value to the experience. These principles can also be applied to digital products. Seamless and unique interactions, animations, and exciting visuals help apps become more engaging and valuable to the customer.

11. Illustrations

Illustrations work like magic when it comes to humanizing the user experience for your product or service. They help explain complex information and bring a touch of color and enjoyment to the functionality of the user interface.

12. Tone Of Voice

The words users are being greeted, informed, and entertained with play a vital role in their overall experience with the product or service. And while writing and branding are deep subjects in themselves, copywriting is an extremely powerful tool that introduces an element of fun and engagement for the user.

To find success in this area, you must write with clarity and purpose, stay away from jargon, and avoid addressing people in a monotone voice. Be playful, use tasteful humor when you can, and try to make your customer the focal point of the experience.

There are many highly-beneficial stock market games to choose from. Below we have listed 7 of the best:

NinjaTrader Free Trading Simulator

With origins dating back to 2003, NinjaTrader has everything you need to get as close as possible to the real stock market trading experience. The game even allows users to change the period and see how they would have performed during the 2008 global recession.

Bear Bull Traders Simulator

Thinkorswim

Thinkorswim is an intelligently-designed app that holds various investing and trading features. In addition, it offers stock charts that track everything, including securities, gold, and oil.

MarketWatch Virtual Stock Exchange

Politics and economics are tightly intertwined, and a shocking news headline can shift the global market just like that.

And that's where MarketWatch comes in. This virtual stock exchange game provides users with relevant market news that impacts people's lives and finances.

Here, people can trade stocks using a virtual portfolio in real time. Furthermore, users can create their own customized private and public games. MarketWatch also provides discussion groups to talk strategies on how to make virtual cash. In addition, the app offers documents for instructors, professors, and teachers, including guides, course materials, and a sample handout.

New features are being added regularly.

Spectre

As a broker's platform, Spectre offers a vast amount of options via its trader's bay shop, where people buy various gamified items to increase trade size and payouts, receive special bonuses, and more.

Some of its most attractive items include:

• Charms — Design elements that can be used to change the visual screen to your liking.
• Spells — Allows you to increase payouts to as much as 5%
• Enhancements — Gives you the option to minimize the spreads, bring up the number of open concurrent positions, and more.

With the help of Gamification, these features give the trading experience a boost when it comes to immersiveness and excitement. As a trader, you can weigh which investment option works best for you and define the most rewarding ones.

Virtual Trader Pro

Here we have an app that comes with two modes: practice and play. In the first mode, you can trade virtual stocks at zero risk of losing. In the second, stocks can be traded with a real win-or-lose scenario. With Virtual Trader Pro, you can dive into a real trading experience that will give you precious insights into the actual trading scene as it simulates the real-life stock market. It comes with real-time prices and quotes, as well as a streaming news service and the latest business headlines.

The Stock Market Game

The Stock Market Game is likely one of the most popular stock market simulators out there. With millions of users worldwide, this game offers numerous trading strategies and various markets for trading, including stocks, oil, gold, currencies, and more. The Stock Market Game is targeted at both beginners and expert investors and comes with a simulated trading environment that allows users to make money with real investment portfolios.

Investopedia Stock Market Game

Investopedia is known for its ability to make complex financial information more accessible to help people make wiser financial decisions — and that is also the reason they created their free market simulation game.

Here, traders receive $100,000 in virtual money to trade in a virtual space. The game is great for both students and potential investors wanting to test themselves on the market without the risk of losing money.

Sadly, Investopedia doesn't provide a real-time trading environment with live stock prices, as there is a significant lag involved. However, users can still learn the basics of trading, as well as various useful terminologies.

Wall Street Survivor

Wall Street Survivor is on a mission to make investing and personal finance accessible via interactive and comprehensive education. It comes with simple jargon-free training courses, as well as a free-to-play virtual stock market game. Wall Street Survivor also offers courses related to other financial areas, such as personal goals, household budgeting, and planning your financial success.

Some of its key features include:

• Step-by-step learning guides.
• Leagues allow people to compete with each other, and monthly leagues with cash prizes.
• A vast library of articles and video materials covering the most basic investing principles, as well as more advanced concepts.
• Training materials in both written and visual formats.
• A strong community of experts is always willing to assist.

Smart Games: Earn Money While Learning to Trade

This trading simulator comes with 5 levels of difficulty and various low and high-stakes trading scenarios. Smart Games provides the user with a solid amount of interactive tutorial levels to help them get a quick grip on the basics of trading. It also has 5 markets to choose from:

• Stocks
• Bonds
• Currencies
• Commodities
• Options

Real money can be made by trading in these in-game markets!

HowTheMarketWorks

This game helps people understand how the market works in-depth. At first, the company wrote detailed articles about the stock market and created a glossary. But what helped them take off was the creation of the
HowTheMarketWorks game — a free-to-play simulation game popular among many teachers and professors. The game is being used by tens of thousands of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and adult investment clubs. It aims to simulate real-life brokerage but with virtual currency. People can practice trading stocks, mutual funds, and EFTs with current prices.

The game also comes with an Education Center that offers investment tips on various levels of competency.

Student Stock Trader

This game is, in many ways, similar to other virtual stock market games. What makes it stand out is its simple design and the absence of advertisements.

In Student Stock Trader, safety and anonymity are of paramount importance. They don't require you to share your personal information — a simple display name is enough to get you started.

There is also a student app available on both the Apple Store and the Google Play Store for people to trade from their mobile devices.

When it comes to Gamification, Smartico.ai is a trusted and globally recognized leader in the field. And while it has a tight focus on the iGaming, Casino, and Sports Betting industries, Smartico.ai can be integrated with and help any business reach new levels of success, including stock trading.

Smartico.ai is a leader in providing state-of-the-art Gamification and CRM automation software solutions. Its CRM tool combines player analytics data with machine-learning algorithms to help businesses of various industries gain a deeper understanding of people and their needs while also providing valuable data insights to ensure retention, loyalty, and much more.

As a leading Gamification & CRM Automation solution, Smartico offers the following:

• Various intuitive challenges and gaming techniques.
• High-value incentives that encourage long-term loyalty and retention, elevate player value, strengthen engagement, and boost user acquisition.
• Multi-Currency/Language/Deep Brand Support.
• Missions – Engage players with fun real-time solo or multiplayer tasks.
• Points – Encourage players to keep coming back through point-based incentives and unlockables.
• Badges – Stand out from the rest with sleek badges and earn free spins for each earned badge.
• Levels – Players gain experience and special perks after each successful level or tournament completion.
• Incentives – Motivate players to come back for more with unique rewards and bonuses.
• Marketplace – Players can actualize their points by cashing them in for free game spins or other awards, such as online shopping vouchers.
• Mini-Games – Players can reset their senses through short, award-earning games.
• Tournaments – Set your own qualification rules and offer your customers a powerful endorphin rush with Smartico's special tournament system.
• Leaderboards – Set daily, weekly, and monthly prizes and watch your user engagement skyrocket.
• Bonus Engine Integration – Cash bonuses, free spin bonuses, and more.

And that's just a small sample of what's on offer. Smartico can help your business grow exponentially by supplying the solutions needed to bring the motivation in your company to a whole new level. Book your free in-depth demo today at: https://smartico.ai/request-a-demo

There's no doubt that gamified apps will continue to grow in popularity in 2023. The demand is massive given that not many people in developing countries can easily access financial and educational systems. The developers who will be crowned as winners are those who manage to create valuable and engaging experiences, those who can take advantage of the latest technologies to construct high-end, inexpensive solutions — the Gamification innovators of tomorrow. And in time, you too can become part of that special winner's club!

The Smartico.ai team wishes you the best of luck on your journey to success!

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