How the site works

FQS is a free club for high schoolers who want to learn finance and quant. You make an account, go through the lessons, and try stuff out on real market data. It's free and you don't need any background to start.

Curriculum and Lessons. Ten units. They start with how exchanges actually work and build up to algorithmic trading. Each lesson is short and ends in a quiz, and finishing one saves your progress in that unit.

Research tools. Pull a live quote, look at a company's fundamentals, compare two stocks, or check economic data like GDP and CPI, all under the Resources tab. That data comes from the Fed's FRED database.

Strategy tester. Build a simple trading strategy and test it on historical data to see how it would have done.

Daily challenge. Every trading day you call whether the market closes up or down. You can put in your call from midnight ET until the market opens at 9:30 AM ET, then it locks. After the close you find out if you got it right.

Daily Trading Floor. A pretend stock market you trade for about seven minutes, with a new stock and a new situation every day. You get one ranked attempt at each level per day plus unlimited practice. There is a full rundown of how it works and how it is scored further down this page.

Dashboard. Your points, streak, badges, connections, and the leaderboard all live here.

Points run the leaderboard. There's no prize for them by themselves, they're just a way to see who's actually putting in the work. Here's every way to get them:

A few things to know:

Everything only pays once. Opening a lesson you already finished, or logging in a second time that day, won't give you more points.

Weekly and all-time. You've got two totals. All-time never resets. The weekly one wipes clean every Monday, so the weekly leaderboard starts over each week and anyone can catch up.

Streaks. Logging in on a trading day keeps your streak alive. Miss a day and it drops back to one next time you log in. It goes by trading days, not the calendar, so weekends and holidays won't break it.

The daily call. You only get the +4 if your call was right, and only once an admin has resolved that day. Getting it wrong doesn't cost you anything.

The Trading Floor. Only your first finished ranked attempt each day earns FQS points, and it is capped at 20. You get 5 for finishing, 5 for hitting the day's objective, 5 for ending in profit, and 5 for a strong result. The big bonus numbers you see inside a round are your trading score, which is a different thing explained below, not FQS points.

Every day the floor opens with a different stock and a different situation, like an earnings surprise, a fed day, or a short squeeze. You start with $100,000 in play money and trade for about seven minutes. The price reacts to news through the day and usually overreacts, then settles back toward its real value, so the idea is to notice when the price is wrong and trade against it.

What you can trade. The stock itself, the FQS Index, which is the wider market and is useful for hedging, and a YES contract, which is a quick bet on whether the stock finishes above a set price. You can place market, limit, stop, and stop-limit orders, and you can arm one auto-rule that fires an order for you when the stock moves a set amount from the open.

Ranked and practice. You get one ranked attempt per level per day, at beginner, intermediate, or advanced, plus as many practice rounds as you want. Practice does not count for anything. Everyone playing the same day gets the same setup, so the daily leaderboard is a fair comparison.

Once you start, you finish. After you begin a ranked round you have to see it through. You cannot bail out and restart with a clean slate at that level. If you leave partway through, by closing the tab or switching away, it pauses and waits for you to come back and finish it.

One day only. A new floor opens after midnight ET and the daily leaderboard resets with it. Points only come from a finished ranked attempt, so if you pause and never finish before the day ends, nothing happens and you get no points.

When a round ends you get a trading score. This is separate from your FQS points and only runs the Trading Floor leaderboard. The site re-runs your whole session from your order log on its own, so the score is based on what actually filled, not what your screen showed. Anything illegal, like shorting when it is not allowed or spending cash you do not have, gets thrown out and does not count.

The score starts from your profit in dollars, then adds and subtracts based on how you got there.

The objective. Each day has one goal that fits the situation, like keeping your drawdown under 6 percent or staying market neutral. It changes with the daily setup. Hitting it adds to your trading score, it does not change your FQS points.

Fair value. Every stock has a hidden real value that the price keeps drifting back toward. You cannot see it while you trade, but it is drawn on the chart once the round ends, so you can look back and see where the price was cheap or expensive and how well you read it.

After the round you also get a short breakdown of what you did well and badly and a label for your style, like disciplined value trader or overtrader, so you know what to work on next time.

Ask in the Discord, or use the Report link at the bottom of any page if something's broken.