Learn finance by playing it.
15 free courses — from your first paycheck to the CFA — built as short levels with instant feedback. Each one ends in a live simulation where you do the actual job. No account needed to start.
Here's a level. No signup.
Three real questions, pulled straight from the courses — bank risk, the CFA track, derivatives pricing. Same instant marking, same worked explanation players get.
A desk uses a 99% daily VaR. Over 250 trading days, how many exceptions (losses beyond VaR) should it expect?
Everyone quotes a 99% VaR. Rather fewer can say how often it should break.
Play the whole level — Risk Arena →A hedge fund manages $100m and returns 10% this year. Under '2 and 20' (2% management + 20% incentive on profit), total fees in dollars (in millions)?
The most quoted fee structure in finance — and the one most often multiplied wrong.
Play the whole level — Charter Climb →It is generally optimal to early-exercise an American call on a non-dividend-paying stock.
It is in the money and you are allowed to exercise today. Almost everyone says yes.
Play the whole level — Quant Quest →1 of 2,477 questions across 357 levels. Progress saves as you play, account or not.
▶ The courses
15 courses in 6 subjects, 357 levels. Start anywhere — nothing is locked behind anything else.
Personal Finance. Your own money and the mind that spends it: budgets, interest, debt, your first investments, and the biases that sink good plans.
Corporate Finance. How a company decides what to invest in, how to pay for it, and what to hand back to its owners.
Public Finance & Economics. Governments and central banks: taxes, budgets, public debt, interest rates, inflation, and the economy they all steer.
Investments & Financial Markets. Stocks, bonds, futures and options: how they're valued and priced, how markets trade them, and how portfolios are built from them.
Banking & Financial Institutions. The firms that hold the system together, and the risk they carry: how much a bank could lose, and how much capital stands behind it.
Quantitative Toolkit. Not a field of finance but the tools every field runs on: maths, statistics, econometrics, code and strategic reasoning.
No course in this subject at that level yet.
Money Basics
Never took a finance class? Start here. Where your paycheck goes, how saving actually sticks, how interest grows (or eats) your money, and what stocks and bonds really are. 6 levels, zero jargon.
Mind Over Markets
Markets are made of people, and people are predictably irrational. Built on Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow — with Thaler and Shiller alongside — this course walks through the mental shortcuts and emotional reflexes that drive real decisions: anchoring, loss aversion, overconfidence, herding, bubbles. Low on math, high on real vignettes. 24 levels across four worlds, ending in a diagnose-the-bias boss.
Reading the Books
Every company reports in the same language, and this course teaches you to read it. Built on Libby, Libby & Hodge's Financial Accounting: the accounting equation and double entry, accruals and year-end adjustments, what sits behind each line of the balance sheet, the cash flow statement, and how analysts read an annual report for warning signs. No prior knowledge needed. 24 levels across five worlds.
Capital Quarters
The three questions every firm faces: which projects to invest in, how to finance them, and what to return to shareholders. Built on Brealey, Myers & Allen — value cash flows, price risk with the CAPM, build a WACC, weigh debt against equity with Modigliani–Miller, and set a payout policy. Assumes you can read a statement and reason about risk. 25 levels across five worlds.
Macro & Markets
Rates, inflation, central banks and the business cycle — the complete macroeconomics course, built on Blanchard. Assemble the IS-LM machine, tame the Phillips curve, grow an economy with Solow, open it to the world, then take the policy chair. 27 levels across six worlds.
Hull Street
How traders lock in tomorrow's prices today: futures and options from first principles, building up to Black–Scholes — the formula that prices them. 21 levels and three end-of-world exams.
Order Flow
Every other course treats the price as a number that exists. This one asks where it comes from. Start at the limit order book — how orders queue, match and cancel — then work out why a spread exists at all: the market maker who quotes it is paid for adverse selection and inventory risk, not for the service. Learn to read order flow for information, then to trade against it without paying for the privilege. 24 levels across four worlds, ending in the chair behind the quotes.
Quant Quest
The deep end: the mathematics behind the trading floor — risk-neutral pricing, Black–Scholes and the structured products built on them. 40 levels, a boss-fight spiral review, and a final trading-desk simulation.
Charter Climb
The whole CFA Level I curriculum — finance's flagship professional exam — as a game: ethics, quant methods, economics, financial analysis, the asset classes and portfolio management. 32 levels across four worlds and four exams.
Risk Arena
How much could we lose tomorrow? Build the one number every bank reports — value at risk — then stress it, backtest it and learn exactly how it fails. 20 levels through the engine room of modern risk management.
Stat Dojo
Statistics is how you tell signal from noise — and almost no one is taught it well. Start with plain data (averages, spread, histograms), meet chance and the bell curve, then earn your black belt in the big idea: how a small sample tells you about the whole world. Low on formulas, high on intuition. 26 levels across five worlds.
Math Masters
Every finance formula is built from the same handful of ideas — compounding, slopes, areas, bell curves and vectors. Meet them visually, so the equations in every other game finally read like sentences. 18 levels across four worlds and four exams.
Runtime Row
Every quant interview has a computer science half, and it is the half people revise last. Runtime Row teaches it the way it is actually asked: say what your code costs before you write it, pick the structure that makes the operation you repeat cheapest — ending at the limit order book, which is the question — recognise the algorithm patterns that keep reappearing dressed as trading problems, keep a number true through ten million floating-point operations, and see the graph hiding inside a netting set or a triangular arbitrage. 30 levels across five worlds, ending inside a trading system with a latency budget you have to hit.
Game Table
Most of finance assumes the world is a coin flip. It isn't — it's a counterparty. Game Table teaches strategic reasoning from the payoff matrix up: find the equilibrium in a simultaneous game, work a game tree backwards to see which threats are actually credible, then sit down at the auctions that decide real money and learn why winning one is so often the bad outcome. Finish with mechanism design — the discipline of writing rules so that telling the truth is the best move. 24 levels across four worlds, ending opposite an opponent who is modelling you.
Regression Range
Econometrics is where statistics meets the real world — the craft of estimating cause and effect from messy, non-experimental data. Start with a single line of best fit and what its slope really means, add controls to hold everything else equal, learn when your standard errors and t-tests can be trusted, and finish by modelling data through time. Built on Wooldridge. 24 levels across four worlds, ending at the range.
🎮 When the course ends, the job starts
Two things the arcade does that a course list doesn't.
Live simulations
Sit in the chair and do the job: run a bank's risk, set a country's interest rate, quote both sides of a market, decide which banks the system is allowed to lose. The consequences are computed, not scripted.
- 19 simulations
- 17 real jobs
- Nothing locked
The mock interviews
A seat at a top trading firm, run the way a first round actually runs: questions one at a time, no hints, and no score until the clock stops. The debrief marks every topic and hands you a study plan wired into the courses.
- 5 seats
- 21 subjects
- Scored debrief
🔎 Why trust the content
Built on the standard texts
Not blog posts. The courses follow the books the subjects are actually taught from — Hull on derivatives, Blanchard on macro, Brealey–Myers–Allen on corporate finance, Wooldridge on econometrics, Kahneman on behaviour.
Free, and not the trial kind
Every level, every simulation, every interview. No paywall, no credit card, no ads, no upsell at level 5. If you want to say thanks there's a coffee link in the footer — that's the whole business model.
Nothing to hand over
Play without an account and your progress still saves. Make one and it syncs across devices — an email and a password, or Google. No trackers you didn't ask for, no data sold. Read the privacy policy.
🗺️ On the roadmap
More finance worlds in the works — the arcade keeps growing.
💬 Questions people ask first
Is Finicade really free?
Yes — every course, every level, every simulation and the mock interview, with no paywall, no trial, no credit card and no ads. There is a 'buy me a coffee' link in the footer and that is the entire business model.
Do I need an account?
No. You can start playing immediately and your progress saves on that device. An account (email and password, or Google) exists so your stars, streak and trophies follow you to your phone.
Who is it for?
Anyone with a reason to learn finance, and there is a path for each reason: getting your own money right, an economics or finance degree, the CFA, or a quant, trading, quant-developer or risk job. Each path lists its courses in order and says why each is there.
Where should I start?
Pick the learning path that matches your goal and start at its first course. If you just want to try it, Money Basics needs no background at all, and Stat Dojo opens most of the study and career paths. Nothing is locked, so you can also go straight to any course you like.
Where does the material come from?
The courses follow the standard university texts for each subject — Hull on derivatives, Blanchard on macroeconomics, Brealey, Myers and Allen on corporate finance, Libby, Libby and Hodge on accounting, Wooldridge on econometrics and Kahneman on behavioural finance — rebuilt as short levels with worked explanations rather than chapters.
How long is a level?
Five to fifteen minutes: a few explanation cards, then a short quiz that marks each answer instantly and shows the working. Every world ends in a boss level, and every course ends in a live simulation.
Will this get me through the CFA, or an interview?
It is practice, not a replacement for the official curriculum. Charter Climb covers the whole of CFA Level I as levels you play, and each mock interview runs a timed first round for a real seat and scores you by topic — both are best used alongside the source material, which is exactly how people use them.
Is Finicade affiliated with CFA Institute?
No. CFA and Chartered Financial Analyst are registered trademarks owned by CFA Institute. Finicade is an independent study aid and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or warranted by CFA Institute.
Is it a phone app?
It is a website that works on a phone — no install, no app store. Add it to your home screen and it opens full-screen like an app.
Pick a cabinet and start.
357 levels, 19 simulations, 2,477 questions. Free, and you can start without telling us anything about yourself.
Playing already? Create a free account to keep your stars, streak and trophies on every device.