Meanwhile, All the Virtual Markets Are Thriving

On the Facebook application Fantasy Stock Exchange, which simulates real markets without the real money, college student Thomas Cleberg is among the best portfolio managers.

On these sites, conservative investing is boring; the fun comes from taking very risky gambles. If you luck out enough in the fake market, the risk is that you may be tempted to log onto Charles Schwab to try to replicate that success.

Take Dave Knight, a UPS worker who lives in Tulsa. His portfolio is up to $310,000 in imaginary money at Wall Street Survivor, and he's near the top of the charts.

Years ago, he dabbled in day trading and lost half his initial investment. Now, in the world of virtual stock markets, he's doing well enough and feeling confident enough that he's started a financial blog and hopes to save and earn enough to start investing in a big way again. He's hoping to eventually pile together $100,000 and take a dive into the real-world market doing the same types of fast-moving investments in financial stocks.

"I'm much more conservative with real money," he said. "I know I could lose it all, but I've learned a lot about the market in the last few years."

But not everybody is as sanguine about jumping into the market after their online experience.

Terry Conley, a retiree who lives in Georgia, wasn't satisfied with how his mutual funds were performing earlier this year, so he started looking around for some stock investing ideas. He started messing around with virtual stock markets as a way to play out some of his investing ideas. At the site, his portfolio is down 34 percent.

His best position is in Freddie Mac, where he's lost only $84 of virtual money. His worst pick was Ambac Financial Group, an investment that has lost $6,450.

Gordon Gekko, he ain't. All told, the "lifetime return" for Conley's fake portfolio is negative 129 percent.

"This has given me an appreciation of the fact that you never know what the market is going to do," he said. "You can do all the research in the world."

At a time when financial advisers are trying to sell their services based on the assertion that they'll be able to help you lose less money than the next guy, that's a lesson Conley learned the cheap way.