Investmate Review: Learn Investing Without the Risk

Bottom line: Investmate is an easy-to-use tool for new investors who want to pick up trading jargon and explore the ins and outs of the stock market. However, the simplistic design and grammatical errors may make the app unsuitable for some users.

At a glance

What is Investmate and how does it work?

Investmate is a financial literacy app designed to help users explore topics about stocks and trading. It includes educational articles, quizzes, and trading tips, as well as a market simulator.

Rather than general personal finance, Investmate topics cover everything from basics like, "What are shares?" to more advanced lessons on futures trading and how to predict market trends. Each educational "step" is compact and quick to complete.

You can choose overall educational goals, as well as daily goals for how many steps you'd like to complete. Easily track your progress and set reminder alerts so you don't miss a day.

If you'd rather have a little hands-on experience, try out the market simulator. Use imaginary money to buy and sell shares while markets change in real time. Trade in everything from gold and oil to the foreign exchange market -- all without risking a penny.

Top perks

Choose goals and track progress

The lessons you get are determined by the learning goal you set. There are three options:

• Learn the ABCs of finance: With this goal, you'll look at the basics of trading. You'll start by learning about markets and shares, then move on to indices and the foreign exchange (forex), touch base on futures, and close out with lessons on risk and rewards.
• Become an expert in contract-for-difference (CFD) trading: This goal covers more advanced topics. The first level deals with liquidity, the second level explains commodities and forex, the third covers derivatives and contracts, and the final level dives into futures trading.
• Learn how to predict trends: This goal involves a series of quiz-like questions on how the market reacted to various major events.

The Investmate app tracks your progress automatically, letting you see at a glance how far you've come as an investor. In addition to an overall goal, you can set daily goals for how many lessons you'd like to complete each day: one step, three steps, or five steps. You can also set practice reminders as notifications so you remember to check in every day.

Compact lessons can be done quickly

Two of the three learning goals (excluding the one for predicting trends) are broken into four levels. Each level has a number of written lessons, quizzes, and trading tips.

Lessons are presented as a series of cards, each containing a sentence or two on the given topic. Key words and jargon are highlighted and linked to definitions to help you learn new terms. For example, if you don't remember what a "spread" is, you can click the word to open a definition and see related terms.

Each step is compact and easy to complete in a short amount of time. Lessons tend to have between 20 and 30 cards, and quizzes only have three or so questions. This makes meeting your daily goal easy and not too time consuming.

Stock market simulator with real updates

For users who want to put their lessons into action, the app provides a stock market simulator. It helps you understand the stock market through trading with fake currency. You have the option to buy and sell single shares in a range of products, including:

• Euro/USD
• Bitcoin/USD
• Ethereum/USD
• Apple (AAPL)
• Gold
• Tesla (TSLA)
• Alphabet (GOOGL)
• Oil through Brent
• Natural gas

The stocks update in real time, and you can see the history of each stock over minutes, hours, a day, or a week. Analyze the market trend to decide whether to sell (when you think the stock is going to drop) or to buy (when you think the price will increase). When you're ready to cash out, close your market position and see whether you've made or lost money.

No real money means no real risk

Perhaps the best part of the stock market simulator is that you're not actually playing with real money. If you want to learn about trading in the real stock market with regular investment apps, any money you lose cuts into your actual savings. With the market simulator, however, you can get the basic feel for trading without actually risking any of your money. So, if you make a wrong call and wind up losing out, your imaginary wallet might sting -- but your real one will be safe and sound.

What could be improved

Some topics could be better explained

Although the lessons in the Investmate app do a decent job of breaking down complex topics and providing helpful definitions, there are places where they lack context or can be hard to follow. Absolute beginners who want to learn how to start investing money may find it hard to jump in without making heavy use of the linked definitions and outside glossaries for certain terms. Some of the questions on market trends also lack context, asking you to predict reactions to events without actually telling you much about the event itself.

App content has poor grammar

Another thing that can make some of the lessons hard to understand is the poor grammar. Some of the sentences are badly constructed with punctuation in odd places -- or missing in others. While this can generally be overlooked, there are certainly times it will disrupt the flow for most readers. And for anyone with an inner editor, this can be downright distracting, making it difficult to get through some lessons.

If you want an app that covers budgeting: Zogo is a financial education app for beginners that covers more basic topics like budgeting and building wealth. Zogo also touches on the basics of investing, but if you want a deeper dive, stick with Investmate.

RELATED: See The Ascent's guide to the best budgeting apps.

If you want an app for kids: World of Money is an app designed for learners of all ages who want to learn the basics of finance. It tailors lessons to different age groups, making it appropriate for younger kids as well as older folks. However, Investmate is the better selection for young adults who want to get started with investing.

Investmate is free to download and use. In fact, you can use the app without creating an account or logging in, unless you want to sync your progress across multiple devices.

Investmate is a solid pick for beginning investors who want to get familiar with industry terms and learn how to invest hands-on without the risk. The lessons are quick to complete and provide definitions for trading jargon. And the market simulator lets you trade fake money to get a feel for the market. If you're often bothered by poor grammar, however, the bad editing could make the lessons hard to finish.