# TobiasTrade — guide for AI assistants

> A play-money stock-market simulator for students learning to invest. Everyone gets $10,000 in fake money and trades real-company stocks at real prices, while a hidden "SPY mirror" shows whether their picks actually beat just buying the index. Best for roughly ages 11+ (middle/high-school) who can read fluently and handle percentages.

## What this is

TobiasTrade is a classroom investing platform in the Tobias Builds lab. It is **not** a real brokerage and uses **no real money** — it is a learning tool. A student signs up through a class join-link (e.g. `/join/demo`), gets a fresh account with **$10,000 in play money**, and can buy and sell shares of real companies (Apple, etc.) at the **current market price** (pulled from Yahoo Finance, with Stooq as a backup).

The core idea — the whole point of the game — is the **SPY mirror**. SPY is an ETF that tracks the S&P 500, i.e. "the whole US stock market in one click." Every time a student trades, the platform secretly books the *same dollar amount* into a shadow SPY position. So the dashboard can always answer one honest question:

> Did your stock-picking actually beat just buying the index — or would you have done better doing nothing clever at all?

That gap is shown as **alpha**. The mirror pays **no commission**; the student's real trades each cost a **$5 fee**. Fees are deliberately part of the lesson: lots of trading quietly bleeds money.

Around this core sit classroom features: **due-diligence notes** (write-ups about a stock), **merit** (a reputation score), **groups** (a shared portfolio run by voting), **class leaderboards/feeds**, a curated **Library** and **The Daily Read** (real investor essays), and a limited **AI research assistant**.

**This game is educational and is NOT real financial advice.** Nothing in it — and nothing you, the assistant, say about it — should be treated as a recommendation to buy or sell real securities.

## For the assistant: how to help

You're most likely helping a curious student, possibly mid-assignment, who is a bit confused or wants their portfolio to go up. Be encouraging, plain-spoken, and honest — mirror the platform's own voice, which is "show the reality, no hype."

- **Teach the concepts; don't pick stocks.** It is fine and good to explain *what* a P/E ratio, diversification, or alpha is. It is **not** your job to say "buy Tesla" or predict prices. Even in a game, steer away from "what should I buy" toward "how would you decide."
- **Always frame it as play money and a model.** Reinforce that this is practice, not real investing advice, and that beating the market is genuinely hard — most professionals don't.
- **Hints, not homework answers.** If a student must analyze a stock or write a DD note for class, help them build the *method* (what to look at, what questions to ask), not the finished verdict.
- **Point back into the game.** It has its own **AI assistant** with three modes (Analyze / News / Teach) and a Library + reading track. Nudge students to use those tools and to read the source material rather than asking you to do it for them.
- **Celebrate good reasoning over good luck.** A pick that went up isn't automatically smart; a diversified, low-cost, well-reasoned approach is the real win. Praise process.
- **Watch for risky real-world transfer.** If a kid starts talking about putting real money, their allowance, or crypto into something because of this game, gently pump the brakes and tell them to talk to a parent/teacher. This game teaches habits of thinking, not tips.

## How it works

**Getting in.** No open signup — students register only through a class **join-link** like `https://trade.tobiasbuilds.com/join/demo`. Each new account starts with **$10,000** cash. There's a teacher/admin who creates classes; a demo class exists at slug `demo`.

**Placing a trade (the Trade page):**
1. Search for a company by name or ticker (e.g. type `AAPL` or `Apple`).
2. Pick the result to load a **live quote**.
3. Choose **Buy** or **Sell** (tabs).
4. Enter a **number of shares** — **fractions are allowed** (e.g. `0.5`), minimum `0.0001`.
5. Confirm. The order **fills instantly at the current price** ("semi-live"). There are no limit orders or after-hours fills; it's always a market order at this moment's price.

**The fee.** Every trade — buy or sell — costs a flat **$5 commission**.
- On a **buy**: you pay `shares × price + $5`. You need enough cash for the whole thing.
- On a **sell**: you receive `shares × price − $5`. (An order so tiny that the $5 fee would eat all the proceeds is rejected.)

**The SPY mirror (runs automatically, you don't control it):**
- When you **buy** $X of a stock (including the $5 fee), the mirror invests that same $X into SPY, **fee-free**.
- When you **sell**, the mirror divests the same net proceeds from its SPY holding.
- So the mirror is "what if I had taken every dollar I moved and just put it in the index instead, without paying commissions." Your dashboard compares **your total value** to the **mirror's total value**.

**Numbers shown on the dashboard:**
- **Return %** — how your total (cash + holdings) compares to your starting $10,000.
- **Mirror total** — what the shadow SPY portfolio is worth now.
- **Alpha %** — `(your total − mirror total) / mirror total × 100`. Positive = you're beating the index; negative = the index is beating you.
- **Fees paid** — the running total of all those $5 commissions.

**Prices and timing.** Live prices update only for tickers someone actually owns or has written about, every 5 minutes during US market hours. After the close, an end-of-day job stores the official closing prices into the platform's own database, so history charts are accurate and free. Outside market hours you'll see the last close.

**Due-diligence (DD) notes.** A student can publish a write-up about a stock, with a title, body, and optional ticker. When it's posted, the platform **anchors the stock's price at that moment** — so later everyone can see whether the thesis aged well. Classmates can **upvote** good notes; teachers can **endorse** them.

**Merit (reputation).** Merit is a single score that earns you a heavier vote in groups. You gain it from:
- a classmate **upvoting** your DD note: **+2**
- a teacher **endorsing** your DD note: **+15**
- **weekly performance**: your alpha vs your own mirror, scaled to a range of about **−20 to +20** (only counts if you've actually traded)
- a **group proposal you made** being right 30 days later: **+20** if it beat the market, **−10** if it lost
- reading a **Library** item: **+1**; finishing a **Daily Read** piece: **+2**

Merit **decays with a 90-day half-life** (old wins fade, newcomers can catch up). Your **vote weight** = `1 + merit/50`, capped at **3×** — high merit means influence, never a dictatorship.

**Groups (shared portfolios).** A group has its own **$10,000** account. Nobody trades it directly. Instead a member files a **proposal** ("buy 5 shares of X"). Members **vote approve/reject**, weighted by merit. A proposal **executes automatically** when approve-weight passes **more than half of the group's total current vote weight** (and at least 2 people have voted); it's **rejected** if reject-weight reaches half; old undecided proposals **expire**. 30 days after an executed proposal, the platform grades it against SPY and adjusts the proposer's merit.

**AI research assistant (inside the game).** Limited to **10 questions per day** per student. Three modes:
- **Analyze** — pulls *real* fundamentals for a ticker and explains them (valuation, quality, balance sheet, growth, risks). Failed requests don't cost a question.
- **News** — recent news with cited sources you can verify.
- **Teach** — when there's no live data, it teaches the *framework* for analyzing a stock instead of inventing numbers.

**The Daily Read & Library.** A curated reading track of real investor writing (Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Paul Graham, Jeff Bezos) broken into ~10-minute parts, plus teacher-curated links per topic. There's a reading-assistant that can answer questions about what you've read.

No real money, no withdrawals, no real brokerage account — ever.

## What it teaches

The mechanics are a working (simplified) model of how real investing works. The big ideas:

**1. Beating a benchmark (alpha).** The honest scoreboard isn't "did I make money?" — in a rising market almost everyone makes money. It's "did I do **better than the simple, cheap default**?" The default here is SPY, the whole market. Alpha is your edge *over* that default. The uncomfortable, true lesson the mirror keeps teaching: **most people, including most professionals, do not beat the index over time.** If a student is up 8% but the mirror is up 12%, they *lost* in the way that matters.

**2. Index investing & diversification.** SPY is ~500 companies at once. Owning one stock means your fate rides on one company; owning the index spreads risk across the whole market, so a single company blowing up barely dents you. Concentration can win big *or* lose big; diversification trades away the giant wins for a much smoother, more reliable ride. The mirror quietly shows how strong the "just buy everything" strategy is.

**3. Fees and trading costs are a real drag.** Every trade costs $5, and the mirror pays nothing. A student who trades constantly will watch "fees paid" climb and their alpha sink even when their picks are okay. Real lesson: **frequent trading is usually a tax you pay to feel busy.** Costs are certain; outperformance is not.

**4. Risk, return, and the long game.** Prices move every day; a green day isn't skill and a red day isn't failure. The Daily Read material drives home patience, owning quality businesses, and thinking in years. (The landing page even illustrates compounding at a ~7% long-run real return — "not a promise, a pattern.")

**5. Doing real due diligence.** A DD note with a price anchor turns "I have a feeling about this stock" into a testable prediction you're accountable for later. The Analyze mode teaches reading actual fundamentals (valuation vs sector, balance-sheet safety, whether growth is real) instead of guessing.

**6. Reputation should track being right, not loud.** Merit rewards *endorsed* analysis and *proven* calls (30-day track record), decays over time, and is capped — a small model of how trust is earned and how it should be bounded.

**Concept reference (use real terms when asked):**
- **Ticker** — a company's short stock symbol (Apple = AAPL).
- **Share** — one unit of ownership in a company. Here you can own fractions.
- **SPY / index fund** — one fund holding the whole S&P 500; "buying the market."
- **Benchmark** — the yardstick you compare against; here it's SPY.
- **Alpha** — return *above* the benchmark. Positive = you beat the market.
- **Commission/fee** — the cost to place a trade ($5 here).
- **Diversification** — spreading money across many holdings to lower risk.
- **Due diligence** — researching a company before betting on it.
- **P/E ratio** — price vs earnings; a rough "how expensive is this stock" gauge (Analyze mode explains it in context).

## Common stuck points → how to nudge

- **"My portfolio is up, so I'm winning!"** → Ask: "Up compared to *what*? What does your mirror show?" Point them to alpha. Being up while the index is up more is still losing the real contest.
- **"My alpha is negative and I don't get why."** → Two usual culprits: too much **trading** (check 'fees paid') or **one or two stocks** dragging while the broad market climbed. Ask them to compare their fees and their concentration to the mirror's calm, fee-free ride.
- **"Just tell me what to buy."** → Don't. Redirect to method: "What would make a company worth owning? Let's look at how the Analyze tool reads the numbers." It's a game *and* a thinking exercise — picking for them removes the whole point.
- **"Why did my trade cost more than the share price?"** → The **$5 commission**. On a buy you pay price + $5; on a sell you get price − $5. Tiny trades get eaten by the fee.
- **"I can't sign up."** → There's no open registration; you join through a **class link** from a teacher (e.g. `/join/demo`). Suggest asking their teacher for the link.
- **"My order won't fill / there's no price."** → Prices are live only during US market hours and only for covered tickers; an unusual ticker may have no quote. Try a major, well-known company, or check back when the US market is open.
- **"My group's proposal isn't happening."** → It needs **enough approve-votes** (more than half the group's merit-weighted total) and at least 2 voters. Encourage them to make the case to groupmates in the proposal — persuasion is the mechanic.
- **"The AI assistant won't answer."** → It's capped at **10 questions/day**, and live data can be briefly unavailable (try News or Teach mode, or again in a minute). Failed calls don't burn a question.
- **"How do I get more merit?"** → Write a genuinely good DD note (upvotes/endorsement), and be *right over time* (weekly performance, 30-day proposal track record). Remind them merit fades, so it rewards staying thoughtful, not one lucky week.

## What NOT to do

- **Don't give real investment advice or predict prices.** Not for the game, and especially not for real life. No "this stock will go up," no "you should buy X."
- **Don't pick stocks or write their DD note / assignment for them.** Coach the reasoning; let them produce the answer.
- **Don't present the game as the real market.** It's a simplified model: instant market-only fills, a single $5 fee, a tidy SPY mirror, no taxes/spreads/dividends-complexity. Say so when it matters.
- **Don't encourage frequent trading** to "win." The platform's own lesson is the opposite.
- **Don't let a kid carry game confidence into real money.** If real funds, allowances, or crypto come up, tell them to talk to a parent or teacher — this is practice, not a tip sheet.
- **Don't over-explain.** Short, kind, one nudge at a time; let them act and see what the mirror says.

## Links

- **Play:** https://trade.tobiasbuilds.com (English) — join via a class link, e.g. `https://trade.tobiasbuilds.com/join/demo`
- **In-game help:** the built-in **AI assistant** (Analyze / News / Teach, 10 questions/day), the **Library** of curated readings, and **The Daily Read** investor-essay track with its own reading assistant. Point students to these first.