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Of course, most of the profits in the market are made on speculation. DEMAND for a stock is all that drives its price up and down, until the day that the stock delists according to its stats. Which means that even if a player is racking up stats left and right, if his expectations are low and everyone sells his stock, it'll be cheap. And that's why you gotta stay on top of this market if you want to build your fortune.
How to join the game:
Joining the game is easy to do and it doesn't cost
you a dime of real money.
When you join, the Bosses lend you $2 million to start your portfolio. The Bosses will want that $2 million back eventually, so if you want to win prizes, your portfolio has to grow. Once you get your money, you will be given full, unrestricted access to the Major League Market's Insider Trading Floor. That's when you can start building your empire.
Please note that each trader may only have one Major League Market account at a time. Traders with multiple accounts will lose all eligibility for prizes and will have their accounts deleted.
Your Portfolio:
Click the 'portfolio' link to view your portfolio. You will get a listing of your available cash,
all your stock holdings, and your total portfolio worth. This is also the page from which you
can do account-related things like change your password,
create an investment bank, etc.
There's a few ways to trade.
1. You can go short or long on any stock.
2. Any order can be a market order or a limit order.
Anyone with half a brain can figure out the basics. Buy a stock. Wait for it to go up. Sell it. How hard is that? That's what we call a long order--it's the basic stock order.
Short sales are also very simple. If you think a stock is going to go down instead of up, short sell it. To be brief, this means that you borrow shares, sell them, and then buy them back later. If your little hunch was correct, you have an extra hunk of cash left over. If you want I should get specific about that, check out the rules on short selling in the Advanced Features.
Limit orders are also described in the Advanced Features section. Plenty of money can be made without them, but avid traders will want to get acquainted with them. The advanced features of the Market provide for more complex activity, but they are not necessary for traders to play.
The Bosses' fee for each transaction is 0.5% of the entire transaction amount.
The Major League Market ain't got taxes. The Bosses and the IRS have a special relationship.
It's set up so even you inexperienced traders should be able to intuit how to use it. But here's a couple notes of explanation.
To view information on a stock, enter the symbol and click the "STOCK PROFILE" button. This will not submit your order. The stock profile will give you up to the minute information on an individual stock.
The rest of the order form is easy to use. Enter the stock symbol, the number of shares you wish to buy or sell, and submit the order by clicking the button titled "Place this Order". After you submit the order, a confirmation screen will appear. It will summarize the order, the cost to you, and ask you to cancel or confirm the order.
To use any of the advanced trading features, access the advanced order form by clicking on the tab which says ... you guessed it: "Get Advanced Order Form". This order form is almost identical, but provides the option to sell short and to place the order as a limit order. Read the advanced features for more about these trade options.
We got four kinds of securities on the Major League Market.
Commodities and options are described in the Advanced Rules section. The Market doesn't trade any commodities futures or options until the season starts anyway.
The Major League Market is based on the underground economy of the Bosses. They financially fueled baseball from the back rooms for decades before finally making their exchange open to anyone who wanted to invest. Teams and players issue stocks to the Major League Market for investment by the Bosses. The Bosses also run the exchange, including enforcement of the Insider Trading Floor rules. It's like they got their own little SEC for themselves. Sort of. They use different means of coercion. Let's not go into that.
How are these stocks valued? Good question. I'm glad I asked it. The baseball players are the cornerstone of the market. Each batter and pitcher spends the season racking up certain statistics--which are also known here as commodities--and at the end of the season those stats are worth a certain amount. Hits, RBIs, stolen bases, and homeruns are counted towards a player's value. If he's a pitcher, then saves, strikeouts, wins and shutouts are also figured in.
At the end of the season, the player cashes in all his commodities. Then each share delists off of the exchange, paying a certain amount of cash for each stat produced that season. It's important to remember that the players produce these commodities throughout the season including playoffs.
Teams, on the other hand, are large, powerful organizations that own more player stock than any one of us could ever imagine seeing in our lifetime. Since they're big and resourceful, they do something with the players they own--they generate wins, and that's worth something. Every time a team wins a game, that team's stock pays out $7 per share. On the spot. Consider it a dividend.
Dividends heat up in the postseason. The League is much more appreciative of teams that win playoff games. Every playoff game a team wins, be it a division title game, a pennant game, or a night of the World Series, pays a dividend of $75 per share.
Player stocks on playoff teams also increase in value, because those players get to play more games. Things get real juiced up around here when teams start clinching division titles, believe me. Used to be fights would break out every night.
How closely you want to pay attention to each commodity's value is up to you. Lots of people make money on the world's stock exchanges simply by buying stock in companies they think have potential for improvement--they don't always dig deeply into the company's accounting. Same with the Major League Market: if you buy Jose Valentin and he turns out to lead the league in stolen bases, you're gonna make money. If your Pedro Martinez pitches a shutout, you know your net worth went up that day.
But other investors like to know where each dollar is coming from--and they'll use those numbers to their advantage. The League pays a specific amount per share of stock, for each of the stats--ten cents per share for a hit, $1.60 a share for a save, etc. (See entire stat payoff list)
How stocks delist:
When a stock delists, the total value of all the stats produced by the player is
"cashed in". If you own the stock at the time of delist, you will receive into your
account an amount of cash equal to the total value of all the stats produced by the
player. You can read the stat values in the
advanced features.
Up until the date of the stock's delist, the only reason a stock's price will change is if traders want to buy or sell. Even if McGwire was on pace to break the home run record, his stock won't change in price unless the traders believe he can keep it up. If the traders think an impending trade to St. Louis (as a hypothetical example) will induce a slump, or if they believe his nagging injury is going to return, they won't be buying his stock and it won't go up, no matter how many home runs he hits. Of course, eventually, the traders will all turn around if he keeps it up, and anyone who bought the stock early on will make a huge profit.
And that's the essence of how the market works.
Restrictions on trading
Read about the Advanced Features
Read the Frequently Asked Questions
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