Trading Flaw

A mobile trading game that plays on your instincts — then shows you the behavioural biases behind your trades. Designed and built end to end by ARK Angel Labs for a client.

Game Behavioural finance Mobile web Client project

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Overview

Paper trading tells you whether you made money. This tells you why.

Trading Flaw hands every player a virtual $10,000 to spread across twelve investment categories, then runs a sixteen-period market where they choose when to rebalance, cut, double down, or sit tight. No market knowledge is needed — the game's own instructions say "all you use here are your instincts", and that is the point. Because every player faces the same controlled scenario, the only variable is the player: the game tags the exact moments where a decision matches a known behavioural pattern, and an expert-analysis report turns those tags into a profile of the player's trading style.

ARK Angel Labs designed and built the product end to end for a client — the scenario engine, the behavioural scoring, the report, the learning content, and the payment flow behind it.

$10,000virtual stake at the start of every game

5 × 12asset classes, each with twelve categories

16 periodsof market to trade through per game

10 markersbehavioural patterns tagged to decisions

Capabilities

How the game works

Instinct-only simulation

No charts to analyse, no news to read — players allocate and trade on price action alone, so decisions reflect temperament rather than research.

Five asset classes

All, Equities, Commodities, FX, and Crypto — each with twelve categories, from US stocks and sovereign bonds to gold, property, art, and wine.

Behavioural markers

Ten patterns — momentum chasing, FOMO, capitulation, loss aversion, boredom trading, and more — matched to trades at specific points in the price path.

Selection-bias gauges

The opening allocation is scored for growth, price, and volatility appetite, each gauge with a neutral notch and a written verdict.

Trading analytics

How weights evolve through the game, weights against profit and loss, and the player's propensity to trade — visualised in the report.

The expert report

Five tabs from selection bias to a conclusion with variance chips, leading into a guided learning journey on behavioural bias and emotion mapping.

Rigged advanced rounds

Five follow-up games — some secretly engineered to punish, reward, or bore the player — revealed only in the report's debrief.

Resume anywhere

Every allocation, price, and period is persisted as a single game record, so games resume where they left off and reports are reproducible.

In the product

A closer look

Trading Flaw asset class picker with tiles for All, Equities, Commodities, FX, and Crypto — Pick an arena: five asset classes, each with its own twelve categories.

The simulation screen with a running total P&L chart and live price moves across twelve categories — The market in motion: running P&L and price moves, twice per period, with the pressure to act.

End of period breakdown showing what the player made, lost, missed out on, and avoided — End-of-period truth: what you made, what you lost — and what you missed or dodged.

Rebalance screen with weight sliders drifted by price moves and a news update strip — Between periods: weights drift with prices, and the player decides whether to act.

Report selection bias tab with a growth gauge, score, and written verdict, in the advanced series — The report's selection-bias gauges: growth, price, and volatility appetite, each with a verdict.

Report trading tab showing trade propensity and trade catalyst charts — Trading analytics: trade propensity and catalysts across the sixteen periods.

Report conclusion tab with variance chips for growth, price, volatility, and concentration — The conclusion: variance chips showing how far from neutral each behaviour sits.

Engineering

How it's built

A deterministic scenario engine. Every player faces the same market, with the starting point randomised per game so replays don't repeat — results are comparable and biases attributable.
Behaviour-linked price paths. In the advanced rounds, a category's returns depend on whether the player is holding it, re-evaluated at every rebalance — markets engineered around behaviour, by design.
Mobile-first, app-store-free. A lightweight web front end over a compact API plays instantly in any phone browser; desktop visitors get the game in a phone-sized frame.
Self-serve unlocks. The analysis report is purchased in-game through hosted checkout, and one purchase carries across all five advanced-series debriefs.

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