The Total Software Sales future for November will IPO on October 11, 2007. The December NPD Futures for home gaming hardware will IPO on October 12, 2007 and for portable hardware will IPO on October 13, 2007.

We have approached the point where we are ready to list more games as global lifetime stocks. Please remember to bid on the games you think the simExchange community would want to trade from the Unlisted Games section. The release date of the game is also a factor, so please update the release dates on the games as well.

We have learned a great deal in terms of listing games for trading. We want to list only those games that will attract a lot of trading interest. We also want to concentrate trading as much as possible, so rather than listing each multi-platform version of a game, we will only be listing a couple at most. Very niche games that will not get much trading will no longer be listed, so bids on game listings is even more important to getting a game listed.

Feel free to post why you think a game should be listed on the game's discussion thread. This can also bring attention to a particular listing.

Just so everyone is on the same page, trading of September futures will freeze at the end of the day on October 17. The NPD Group will announce results the evening of October 18. The futures will expire and payout soon afterwards.

Based on popular demand, we have now launched a page dedicated to currently active IPOs. This page will only show ongoing IPOs and you can trade the IPOs from this page directly. This should make it easier for you to find and trade the futures and stocks that are currently in IPO phase.

We have made several improvements to the content submission system. The long outstanding problem regarding specially formatted characters should now be fixed. You should now be able to submit summaries that include the curly quotes, ellipsis, and long dash characters. The submit content form has also been moved to a more convenient location on the page.

Additionally, based on user feedback, the DKP costs and awards regarding bids have been changed. Bidding on content and comments now only costs 100 DKP and you gain 100 DKP for each person who votes the same way you do. The lower cost and increased return is intended to encourage more people to bid on content. The awards for up bids on content and comments has now been increased to 1000 DKP per up bid.

Please report any bugs you run into while using the content submission system.

The Most Traded table on the Trader's Front Page now considers the value of the shares traded, so as to represent the most traded stocks and futures based on the DKP that has been exchanged, rather than just the number of shares that have been exchanged. This should be more representative of the most traded predictions on the simExchange for that day.

We've been working to make the simExchange more useful for those folks who are interested in game sales forecasts but cannot participate in the prediction market. Now, visitors who are not logged in will see the new front page that is more focused on the predicted sales data and explains a bit about the methodology that generates the data. Traders who are logged in will see the usual trading front page.

Non-trader visitors will no longer see pricing data and price changes on the stocks and futures browsing screens, so that they can more clearly see the information that is most relevant for them. We hope this makes it easier for non-traders to view and use what we believe to be some of the most accurate forecasting data available for the video game industry. This should also make it easier for you to reference the simExchange as a resource for forecasts on your blog or other message boards.

Suggestions on how we can make the simExchange and our prediction data more useful for more people are always appreciated.

This blog post was written because Just_Ben's post addresses some important points. Thanks for your feedback. Remember, we generally read the General and Help forums, but to ensure we do read your feedback/questions, sending us an email is best. We simply can't read every post on the site.

Educating new players on how to play the game has been a big issue for us. The tutorials are very straightforward to me (but I'm a life long trader). We can always use your help on what is confusing for you and what concepts we assume too much. Feedback on how to improve the tutorials or the learning process in general are always highly appreciated.

The short selling and margin system on the simExchange is modeled after practices in the real world. In the real world, when you short sell stock, you get cash for selling the stock you borrowed. However, this cash is not locked up. You can in fact buy more stock (or short sell more stock) with this cash. This is called "leveraging" your position and will decrease your % equity. However, this is only allowed if you have a margin account (with some brokers you must apply for this status, other brokers give you a margin account by default). This is often called "buying on margin."

The main reason you will see a bias towards buying vs shorting is a natural effect of human nature. As many traders here know, there is a psychological preference for people to BUY rather than SHORT SELL. In fact, there has been an ongoing stigma against short sellers for the past hundred years. Many people consider short selling (going bearish) as being "Un-american." Our government has established regulation that is biased against short-selling, such as disallowing short selling on downticks (when the last trade decreased the market price). In general, people will rather choose to be part of something positive rather than something negative. Another reason is that many people don't know what short selling is--they simply don't know that you can sell shares you don't own!

As for the IPO system, this is something we have been developing over the last few months. We had in fact planned to make a system where people submitted sealed bids which would resolve in some form of auction system and an IPO price would later be revealed, but decided that it may be another process for people to learn. If you check out the discussion on IPO systems at the time, many people were confused when we were establishing any kind of IPO system (previously, we just relied on the game's submitter to suggest an IPO price and we started the stock from there).

Instead, we settled with a simpler system where people just place limit orders like in regular trading, but without the automated market maker. Playes who use Advanced Trading mode didn't have anything new to learn, while players who use Basic Trading mode would just have to learn how to place a limit order, which we encourage regardless.

The fact that everyone can see what is going on in this IPO system is actually intended so that the market can consolidate the IPO price to a tighter price range faster. We may revisit the idea of a sealed bid auction for an IPO system in the future, but the biggest obstacle is keeping things simple for the userbase and keeping the learning curve down.

Thanks again for your thoughts. We always encourage our users to post their thoughts and suggestions on how to improve the site.

September is now over and the rankings are in...Just_Ben is our number one player for September 2007 with a 224.95% return. Congratulations to scotlandyard and -THE-RAY- who took second and third place respectively. Check out the complete rankings for September.

The August Sales Review Report is now available to the public in the research section. This report was originally released on September 14 and was covered by the media. In the future, Research Reports will be available online sooner.