The fake trading app prank, and how to film it

First, the line you don’t cross

A prank is a joke with a reveal at the end, and nothing real rides on it. Telling your brother you’ve just put your savings into one stock, filming his face, and showing him it’s a prop a minute later is a prank. Showing him the same screen so he lends you money, copies the trade, joins a group you run or pays you to teach him is fraud, whichever tool drew the screen. This guide is about the first kind; our acceptable use policy covers the rest.

Three more limits. Play it only on someone who knows you — a friend or family member, never a stranger. Pick stakes that make the reveal funny rather than a relief: a claim about your own imaginary money lands, while a claim about theirs — their savings, the rent, an account you share — produces panic, and panic doesn’t cut into anything worth posting. And keep the prank inside the app. It makes screens, not messages; a text or an email dressed up as coming from a real bank or broker is a phishing tool, whatever the joke was meant to be.

What the app does when they tap

Pozer’s Robinhood-style trading app (an original design with no Robinhood name, logo or artwork) opens on Investing: the account’s total, today’s move, a line chart with a row of windows under it — LIVE, 1D, 1W, 1M, 3M, YTD and 1Y — then Buying power and your Holdings. Tapping a holding opens that stock’s own page, and that page is where Buy and Sell live. Everything a prank needs happens on those two screens.

Just as useful is knowing what doesn’t happen. There’s no market feed, so every price sits exactly where you typed it, and nothing on the screen moves by itself: no ticking price, nothing pulsing. The five icons along the bottom do open screens — Investing, Retirement, Crypto, Cash and Account — and so does the Buying power row, which opens Cash; all of them agree with the figures you typed. What doesn’t respond is the furniture: the search and bell icons, and buttons such as Deposit, Withdraw and Open an IRA. Plan the prank around Investing and the holding pages, and keep your friend near them.

Pick a prank the app can carry

• “I just bought it.” You tap Buy on camera and the receipt does the talking: the share count, the cost, an order ID and the time. This is the one the app is built for.
• “Have a look at this.” You hand them the phone on Investing. They can scroll the holdings, switch windows, open a stock or wander into the other tabs, and it behaves like an app because it is one.
• “It all went red.” A losing day turns the screen over. On the 1D view the app opens on, the Today figure, the chart and the window buttons all go orange-red, and so does every holding that fell.

What it can’t carry is anything that needs a price to move while they watch. A stock crashing in real time takes two takes and a cut, with the numbers changed in between; the reaction video guide covers how to make the before and the after agree.

Set the account up for the joke

The account’s figures are set in the editor, in four groups: Header, Headline, Chart and Positions. These are the fields that decide whether a prank survives:

• Buying power has to cover the buy. An order bigger than your buying power fills only the shares it covers, and the receipt lists the rest as Unfilled — a line they can read. Work out the cost before you roll. A hundred shares of the default Nvidia at $412.60 costs $41,260.00, more than the default buying power of $24,813.42; that order fills 60.13 shares and leaves 39.87 unfilled. For that buy, raise buying power first.
• Type it to the cent. $24,813.42 reads as an account; $25,000.00 reads as a number someone typed. It shows under the chart, on every holding’s page, and again on the Cash and Account tabs.
• Make the stock the story. You get up to eight holdings, each with a Ticker, Company, Shares, Price and Day %. The list shows the ticker and share count with the position’s value in a filled pill — your accent colour if it’s up on the day, orange-red if it’s down. The company name only appears on the holding’s own page.
• Set the mood with Day %. The Today figure under the total is worked out from each holding’s Day %; there’s no separate field for it. A good day or a bad one is decided row by row.
• A ticker they know needs a price they’d believe. If the prank uses a real company, set its price near where it actually trades. Anyone who follows the stock will know the number is wrong.

Where the Buy button is, and how the moment plays

Buy isn’t on Investing. It sits at the bottom of each holding’s own page, so the move on camera is two taps: the holding, then Buy. That’s better for the shot than it sounds, because the holding’s page tells the viewer what’s being bought before the thumb lands.

1. Tap the holding in the list. Its page opens with a back arrow and a bell, the ticker over the company name in large type, the price and today’s move, a chart with the same row of windows, and a Your position block: Shares, Market value, Portfolio diversity and Buying power. Pinned above the tabs is the trade bar: your account name on the left, then Sell at the bid, outlined in your accent colour, and Buy at the price, filled in it — Sell • $412.58 and Buy • $412.60 on the default Nvidia.
2. Tap Buy. A sheet slides up with Cancel on the left, the amount in shares — 0 sh until you type — a Note (optional) field and a keypad. Leave the note empty; nothing typed there reaches the receipt. The Buy button under the keypad stays dim until there’s a number.
3. Type the share count and tap Buy. A tick draws itself, the word FILLED appears over the shares bought — +100 sh — and the approximate cost sits under it. On the free tier, the SIMULATED · POZER.COM mark sits under that.
4. Below that is the receipt: Symbol, Side, Type (always Market), Shares, Avg. price, Cost, an Order ID, and Filled with the date and time. It doesn’t time out. It stays on screen until you tap Done, or the dimmed strip above the sheet, so there’s no hurry: hold it up to their face.

The Filled time comes from the phone’s own clock at the moment of the tap, so it shows the same time as the status bar in the same shot. Sell is the same sheet the other way round, with Proceeds on the receipt where Cost was; ask to sell more than the holding has and it sells what’s there, headlines that, and lists the rest as Unfilled.

Then the part to script around. After Done, the holding’s page shows more shares, a bigger market value and less buying power. Back on Investing, neither the total nor the Today line has moved: the money went from buying power into the stock at today’s price, and shares bought today haven’t earned today’s move. The payoff of a buy is the receipt’s Cost line and the drop in Buying power, not the big number at the top. “I just spent forty grand” works while you’re pointing at Cost; “look at my balance” doesn’t.

When they’re holding the phone

• Install it first. Opened from the home screen, the app runs fullscreen with your name and icon and no address bar; a browser tab shows its link across the top. On iPhone, open the link in Safari, then Share → Add to Home Screen; on Android, open it in Chrome, then ⋮ → Install app.
• Your Edit button stays out of the shot. In the installed app it’s hidden while you film. Holding two fingers still on the screen for a moment brings it back for five seconds, and one finger never does, so a friend’s thumb resting on the glass can’t surface it. The first time it appears in an installed app it comes with a hint saying so. On iPhone the home-screen app doesn’t share Safari’s sign-in, so the first two-finger hold asks for your email instead; sign in once with the code and Edit appears. Do this before you roll. In a browser tab it never hides.
• Know what the free tier shows. Free apps carry SIMULATED · POZER.COM in small print under the Today figure, under each stock’s day move, on the other tabs and on every order receipt. Use it: pointing at it is the easiest reveal there is. Pro at US$12.99/mo removes it.
• Expect them to wander, and watch Crypto. Every tab opens, but with no coins in the holdings the Crypto tab reads $0.00 and “You don’t own any crypto yet.” — fine for most characters, odd for one who has been talking crypto up. Give the account a coin, which then shows in Holdings too, or keep them off that tab. Pulling down on Investing turns a refresh spinner without changing a figure.
• Silence the phone. A real message sliding down mid-prank breaks it, and it can show them something private.

The reveal, and the reset

End it on camera. Tell them, show them the mark or the Edit screen, and keep that moment in the cut: a prank video without its reveal is a video of someone being lied to. Then ask before you post it. The person on the other end of the phone should get a say in whether their face goes out.

Every order you place is saved in the app on that phone, so if you close it and open it again, the share counts and buying power are where the last take left them — until you publish a change, which replaces the take the next time the app opens. Before the next take, hold two fingers on the screen to bring back Edit (on iPhone, sign in the first time), tap it, then tap Reset to published values, and the app reloads with the numbers you published.

What ends a prank early

1. A buy bigger than your buying power, so the receipt shows shares left unfilled.
2. A round buying power where a real one would have cents.
3. A real company’s ticker at a price its followers know is wrong.
4. A friend on the Crypto tab of an account with no coins, reading $0.00 and “You don’t own any crypto yet.”
5. Last take’s orders still in the account, so the shares don’t match the story.
6. A browser tab instead of the installed app: an address bar, and an Edit button that never hides.