---

The Event/Scoring

The goal, as always, is to accumulate as much wealth as possible as fast as possible. If any shares are held when the contest ends, they will be sold at the last day's closing price. A team's score is the amount of money remaining, plus a participation bonus: I will add in some sum of money for each person who made a trade on the system. (The per-person bonus will be determined later, but should be around $5000 this year.) Each person should make trades from their own machine, as extra verification that they are who they say they are.

After seeing the first day's results, I decided to leave the per-participant bonus at $10,000 this year, identical to last year.

---

Basic Functions

Viewing Your Portfolio

Simply follow the links from the main page, identify your team and enter your team's password (your team subcaptain should have this). The portfolio is displayed and time stamped. The prices are current as of the time of the request (the time stamp), and are NOT updated automatically. To update the prices without making any trade, click the "Discard Order; Update Prices" button. (Note this clears any fields you've typed in.) Alternately, you can submit a "blank" form (without any changes, or in the reset state) to get updates on your team's portfolio.
To view your team's trading histories for a stock, click on the symbol name. There is also a comprehensive list of all symbols ever traded by your team below the table for this purpose.

Pricing

To get the current reported prices for a symbol you don't hold, execute a transaction on 0 items of it; the symbol will show up on your next portfolio report only, and then will disappear. The easiest way of making a 0-share transaction is to just enter the symbol in one of the new entry fields below; you don't actually need to enter a number or change the transaction type. To keep it around for another update, where it's listed with the other stocks, just click one of the transaction types for it before submitting.

Buying/Selling

To buy or sell something you already hold in your portfolio, on the line where the item is listed simply check "Buy" or "Sell" and enter a volume (note the default volume is your entire holdings of that item -- be careful!). For new symbols, enter the symbol in one of the "New Order" lines at the bottom of the form, and do the same. (You can also enter a symbol in one of the lines below even if you already hold it.) The symbol is re-priced when the order is submitted; this means that the actual price of your transaction may not be exactly what is shown on the form you're submitting, especially if the form is at all old.
Note that there are two prices listed, a bid and an ask, which are different for many symbols. You buy at the ask price and sell at the bid. The spread between them means that if you buy and then immediately sell (or vice versa, if you already hold it) you've instantly lost some money. This is not because of commissions for the sale, which would cause additional losses on top of the spread losses; there are no commissions. (This money goes to the group which organizes the trading for a particular item.)

---

Details of the Interface

• Don't click your browser's "Reload" button while viewing your portfolio! If you do and let it report the form data, it will perform your last successful transaction (already performed) yet again! This is rarely what you want.
• The "Reset" button in the bottom middle only erases the fields of the form; it does no recomputation of any of the data. It returns the form to its state when you first downloaded it.
• Remember, to update the prices, you can submit a reset/blank form. The "Discard Order; Update Prices" button is equivalent to a "Reset" followed by a "Submit."
• Transactions are an all-or-nothing proposition; if any part of one fails for any reason, nothing is changed, and you should go back, correct the problem, and resubmit the whole transaction.
• The "Average Purchase" column listed is the weighted average purchase price of your current holdings of that symbol; it's meant to give you an idea of how much you spent for that item in aggregate. Note that selling does not change the average purchase price, and buying changes it in proportion to the relative volumes.
• The value of the portfolio listed is computed as if you were to sell everything immediately; as always, sells are at the current bid price.
• Quirky detail you should be able to ignore: You can enter a single symbol multiple times on the same order form, including the one from the current holdings listing, even with mixed buy/sell requests. Instead of selling the total number requested at the bid price and buying the total number at the ask, the net change for that stock on the whole order form is tallied and then the resulting single net order is executed at the appropriate bid or ask price. This means that if I both sell 100 shares of stock A and buy 100 shares of stock A on the same order form, then the orders cancel and I get charged nothing. Note that if I submitted the buy and then on a separate order form submitted the sell, I would lose the difference between the bid and ask prices (if there is one for that particular symbol).

---

The Data Feed

The data has fairly extensive coverage over the range of tradable securities and has many derivatives. If you can find a symbol for something, there's a good chance we can get data on it; try it. The advertised categories include:

• stocks
• mutual funds
• corporate bonds
• futures/options
• market indices

There is no commission, with the intent of encouraging trading. You can trade any time, even if the markets are closed; the most recent reported price is used.