How to make a fake stock app for a video

First, the line you don’t cross

A portfolio on a phone in a skit, a short film or an explainer is a prop, like a briefcase of prop banknotes. The same screen posted as your own account is something else. A portfolio screenshot is the usual credential behind a paid trading course, a signal group or a mentorship, and presenting a simulated one as yours — to sell any of those, or to get anyone to invest — is prohibited by our acceptable use policy, and accounts that do it are closed. This guide is about the prop.

What you need

• The phone you’ll film with. On iPhone you’ll install from Safari; on Android, from Chrome.
• About fifteen minutes, most of it spent deciding what the numbers should say.
• Pozer’s Robinhood-style trading app. Building, installing and filming are free. Free apps carry a SIMULATED · POZER.COM mark on screen, and Pro removes it.

Step 1: Open the template and read the screen

Open the trading app in the editor. It’s called Ticker, with its fields down one side and a live preview of the phone beside them — above them, on a phone. The home screen reads from the top: search and bell icons, the title Investing, the total value, today’s move in money and per cent, a line chart, a row of windows (LIVE, 1D, 1W, 1M, 3M, YTD, 1Y), then Buying power and a list headed Holdings. Five icons along the bottom open Investing, Retirement, Crypto, Cash and Account. Each holding opens its own page: the company name, the price and the day’s move, a chart with the same windows, a Your position block, and a trade bar with Sell and Buy.

Below the App identity section, the fields come in four groups: Header for the account name and currency, Headline for buying power, Chart for the trend, accent and background, and Positions for the holdings. The account name doesn’t title the home screen, which always reads Investing; it sits on each stock’s trade bar and on the Account tab. The preview switches windows and tabs as you’d expect, but a holding’s own page, and Buy and Sell with it, only open in the published app.

Step 2: Decide whose phone this is

Before typing a number, decide who owns the account. A student with a few thousand dollars in two funds, a day trader with one enormous position and someone twenty years into a dull index portfolio are three different screens, and a viewer reads all of it: how many holdings, how big each one is, how much cash is sitting idle. The default is a particular person — about $225,000 in four large tech companies, with around $25,000 of buying power. If that isn’t your character, change the holdings before anything else.

Step 3: Type the holdings and let the app do the sums

Each holding takes five fields: Ticker, Company, Shares, Price and Day %. You get up to eight, share counts can carry decimals for fractional shares, and it’s the ticker that shows in the list — the company name appears only on the holding’s own page. Give a holding the symbol of a coin the app draws — BTC, ETH, SOL, DOGE and the other majors — and it reads as a coin amount, 0.0425 BTC rather than shares, and shows on the Crypto tab as well. Everything else on Investing is worked out from those fields and the buying power, so none of it can contradict the rest:

Position value = Shares × Price
Total = every position’s value + Buying power
Today = what the account has gained or lost since yesterday’s close
Today % = Today ÷ what the account was worth at yesterday’s close

With the defaults, that’s $200,399.00 in holdings plus $24,813.42 of buying power, a total of $225,212.42, up $4,559.65 on the day. The percentage beside it, 2.07%, is measured against the whole account, cash included, so it’s lower than the 2.33% the positions moved on their own. Each row’s pill shows the position’s value rounded to the dollar: 180 Nvidia shares at $412.60 read $74,268.

Orders placed on camera leave the total and Today almost exactly where they were, the way a brokerage’s day figure behaves. Shares bought at today’s price haven’t earned the day’s move, so a buy changes neither. A sale banks its share of the move, so selling doesn’t take it away. The one change is the spread: a sale fills at the bid, a cent or two a share under the price, so selling 10 Nvidia takes 20 cents off both. Sell everything and the day still reads what it made, less those cents.

That rules out the arithmetic mistakes. It doesn’t rule out the judgement ones.

Step 4: Make the day believable

Day % is the only market in the app: nothing moves unless you type it. That makes it the easiest place to overdo things. Large companies tend to move a percent or two on an ordinary day, a spread of them moves less, and on most days some rows go down while others go up. Four of the biggest companies on the market all up by double digits on the same day is the kind of day that makes the news, and a screen showing one without a reason in the script looks typed.

Colour follows the numbers. A holding that’s up on the day gets a pill in your accent colour with dark text; one that’s down gets orange-red with white text. The Today figure takes the day’s colour too, and on LIVE and 1D so do the chart and the row of windows. On the longer windows the line takes its own colour — up or down over the stretch it’s showing.

Step 5: Buying power, then the chart

Buying power is the cash beside the holdings, and it’s printed to the cent all over the app: under the chart, on every holding’s page, twice on the Cash tab and again on the Account tab. Real buying power is what’s left after fills, fees and settlement, so it almost never lands on a round number. The default, $24,813.42, is that way on purpose.

The chart comes from the Trend field: a row of bars you drag into shape, with trend up and randomize shortcuts under them. The windows show different amounts of it. LIVE and 1D show the last sliver, which is mostly the day’s noise, tilted so the line always goes the same way as the Today figure, over a dotted line at yesterday’s close. 1W, 1M, 3M and YTD show progressively more, and 1Y shows all of it. The default climbs, falls about a quarter from its high, then works its way to a new one, because an account that only ever went up is the least believable thing a brokerage screen can show.

Every full-size chart in the app is drawn from that one Trend — the account’s, the Crypto tab’s and each holding’s — with its own texture, so no two holdings draw the same line. The small line beside each row of the Holdings list is the exception: it’s drawn from that holding’s Day %, so it rises or falls with the day’s move rather than with your curve.

Step 6: Currency and colour

Currency can be US dollars, euros, pounds or Indonesian rupiah. Whichever you pick, figures print the American way — a comma for thousands, a point before two decimals, the symbol in front — so a rupiah account reads Rp225,212.42. If your audience writes money differently, decide whether that matters to the scene before you choose.

The accent colour paints every gain on the screen, the chosen window and the trade buttons, while losses always draw in the same orange-red. If you change it, avoid two choices that quietly break the screen. An orange or red accent makes gains and losses the same colour, so the screen stops saying which way anything went. A dark one swallows the dark text printed on it — the rising holdings’ pills, the chosen window and the Buy button. And keep the background dark: the text is drawn in white.

Step 7: Name it, publish it, put it on your phone

Name the app in App name (home screen) — the editor suggests Ticker, Position, Bell and Parlay — and upload your own icon, or leave it and the editor makes a letter tile from the name. Set both now: they’re fixed on the home screen at the moment you install. Then tap Create home-screen app. If you aren’t signed in, it asks for an email address and a six-digit code, then gives you the app’s link and a QR code to scan with the phone you’ll film with.

iPhone

1. Open the link in Safari. It has to be Safari — Chrome and the browsers inside Instagram or TikTok won’t install it properly.
2. Tap Share.
3. Tap Add to Home Screen.

Android

1. Open the link in Chrome.
2. Tap the ⋮ menu.
3. Tap Install app.

From then on it opens from the home screen fullscreen, with your name and icon and no address bar.

Step 8: Film it

• Bring it to life with your thumb. Nothing on this screen animates on its own, so every bit of movement in the shot comes from a touch: scrolling the holdings, switching windows and tabs, opening a stock.
• Open every holding once before you roll. The editor’s preview can’t show their pages, so the phone is the first place you’ll see each price, day’s move and share count laid out on its own screen.
• Change numbers between takes on the phone. In the installed app your Edit button is hidden while you film; hold two fingers still on the screen for a moment and it appears for five seconds. On iPhone the home-screen app doesn’t share Safari’s sign-in, so the first time, the same hold asks for your email and a code instead. Edit opens every field from the editor, starting from what you published rather than from the last take, and its Reset to published values clears any orders a take placed.

Mistakes that give a fake stock app away

1. Every row up, and every move large.
2. A round buying power.
3. A real company’s ticker at a price nowhere near where it trades.
4. A portfolio that doesn’t fit the person holding the phone.
5. Money written in a format your audience doesn’t use.
6. A browser tab, address bar and all, in place of the installed app.