If you are an investor who uses the simExchange for evaluating your investment decisions and you would like to speak to the press for an upcoming story, please contact us ASAP.

The simExchange now features a new Monthly Rankings comparison. This page ranks players by their month-to-date return. The purpose is to provide players a picture of how they are doing against other players in the shorter-term.

September futures contracts for Stranglehold (Xbox 360) and Total Software Sales have been listed.

Additionally, August futures contracts are set to expire at 11:30 PM Pacific on September 12, 2007 ahead of NPD's report on September 13.

We want to provide special recognition for those of you who go out of your way to support the simExchange by converting others to join. A new The simExchange's Top Supporters page has been added to the Community section. This page ranks players by the number of people they have converted onto the simExchange. "Converts" are the people you referred onto the simExchange.

You can refer friends using the Refer a Friend form. This feature also automatically adds your friend to Your League. For this reason, the referral link in the email sent to your friend is unique and only usable by your friend.

You can refer people you don't know to the simExchange by using Your Referral Link which is found at the top of all pages that support the feature. This link can be used in message boards or your blog when you want to talk about a game's forecast or some other resource you want to reference on the simExchange. If the visitor ends up signing up, they will count as your "Converts."

Once again, a big thank you for all of those spreading the word about the simExchange prediction market.

One of the areas on the simExchange we have been striving to improve is the discussion on the simExchange. For those who have been with us for a while, you have noticed we have added numerous tools to make discussing on the simExchange easier.

You can quickly find all comments that have been posted recently anywhere on the site from the Recent Comments aggregator page. You can also check out which are the comments people find Most Valuable.

You can now reply to a player directly so that readers can track the exact comment you are responding to. Permalinks for every comment are available so you can reference what other people are saying. We integrated news articles so that they can be better used in discussion.

However, we have heard from many of you that the environment leaves more to be desired. We would also like to see more people posting, lively conversation and debate. Some players have suggested a separate forum for casual discussion. Today one player expressed that the moderation system through bidding deters people from taking part in debate, especially if arguing for an idea other people don't like.

The discussion space is not intended to limiting posts only to sales numbers. For a game, you can be posting about sales numbers, but you can also be posting what you expect from the game, your impressions from playing it, whether you think anyone at your local store is buying the game, etc. This isn't a statistics forum. We have set up the discussion so that articles are more integrated into discussion. We encourage you to discuss the articles--say you think the article was great or you didn't like it.

The moderation system is there to root out spam and allow people to express what they think about other people's comments, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be any fun in the forums. The goal was to allow people to more easily identify which comments other people found useful. Do you think the loss of DKP is too penalizing? Or is it the track record of down bids?

We would like to hear how you think we can handle discussions better here. For those of you who rarely or never post comments, tell us why! We don't want you to feel like the simExchange community is an "elite clique" to any degree. How can we make you feel more welcomed?

Many users have asked why we are decreasing the number of stocks available for trading, rather than increasing the number.

As many players have noticed, for a long time, we were very aggressive at listing stocks. We did this because we knew the community was looking for a wider range of games to trade. Fans wanted their favorite upcoming games listed for trading.

And so, we listed as many games as we could, from games years away to games that came out a week ago. However, we soon found that this we the wrong way of going about the issue.

The simExchange was flooded with games. Some only a few dozen players were interested in trading. Some that were completely overlooked as they fell through the cracks between bigger game listings.

True, this gives more choice to what people can trade. However, in a market, this is a problem because many of these stocks become inactive. It is no fun for a new player to start an account, buy some stocks, and find out that no one else even trades those stocks. The stocks sit in their portfolio, 0 shares traded each day, and soon boredom ensues.

From a forecasting standpoint, a prediction market requires a diverse pool of participants constantly trading to price in the news. Many players have noticed that the overlooked, inactive stocks are generally the ones that are the most mispriced.

For these reasons, we continue to delist stocks without adding more. There are currently 220 stocks still listed on the simExchange. Many of these are for games that have not been released, and many of these games are fairly large titles that have not seen much trading.

You can of course help by trading a wider range of stocks and futures. Another way to help is to tell more people about the simExchange. Tell your friends. Tell people on message boards. Tell your blog readers.

Remember to use your referral link (the thing in the blue box at the top of each page). This link sends visitors to the page you are looking at and credits you with a referral if the person ends up joining after visting the link. Use this when referring to simExchange forecasts, when talking about how big a game can be, for just telling them about your favorite video game stock market. Help grow our community and you will reap benefits, too.

The industry has demanded and the simExchange is responding. We are introducing a new type of futures contract to forecast the total video game software sales in a particular month. The reason this is important is to see how big the video game industry really is.

The new futures contract trades much like the unit sales contracts. It will also be settled against NPD Group's data. 1 DKP price corresponds to $10 million in sales. For example, a 45 DKP price on the future would correspond to $450 million in sales.

We will be IPOing an August Total Software Sales contract on August 31, 2007 as a trial run to see how our system functions. Please report any problems you encounter while using this new contract and the related features by using the Contact Us form.

To help you better forecast this figure, the total software sales figure for the same month last year and the one for the previous month are provided in the Total Software Sales Wiki summary for your reference. Submitting news from the Total Software Sales page will submit to Industry News. Commenting on the futures will appear in the Industry News channel.

The simExchange is continuing its consolidation of stocks listed for trading. The following stocks are candidates for delisting. These stocks were chosen for delisting due to inactivity in the stock and/or lack of discussion for an extended period of time.

All shares will cash out at the last traded price. This price is determined as the fair value as the market has not viewed the price as undervalued or overvalued for some time. These stocks will no longer appear when browsing the genres and platforms pages. You will still be able to view the stocks' pages by searching for the games.

If you feel any of the following should not be delisted, please make a case and post in this forum before 11PM Wednesday August 29:

After Burner: Black Falcon (PSP)
Battlestations: Midway (PC)
Bullet Witch (Xbox 360)
Burnout Dominator (PSP)
Cooking Mama: Cook Off (Wii)
Dawn of Mana (PS2)
Death Jr. and the Science Fair of Doom (DS)
Def Jam: Icon (PS3)
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (DS)
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (PS2)
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (PS3)
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (PSP)
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Wii)
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Xbox 360)
FEAR (PS3)
Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales (DS)
Formula One Championship Edition (PS3)
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (PS2)
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (PSP)
Halo 2 (PC)
Infernal (PC)
Kirby: Squeak Squad (DS)
Lunar Knights (DS)
Madden NFL '07 (Wii)
Major League Baseball (PS2)
Major League Baseball (PS3)
Major League Baseball (PSP)
Major League Baseball (Xbox 360)
NBA Street: Homecourt (PS3)
NBA Street: Homecourt (Xbox 360)
Prince of Persia: Rival Swords (PSP)
Prince of Persia: Rival Swords (Wii)
Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters (PSP)
Rogue Galaxy (PS2)
Shrek the Third (PC)
Shrek the Third (Wii)
Shrek the Third (Xbox 360)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (PC)
SSX Blur (Wii)
Theme Park DS (DS)
TMNT (DS)
TMNT (PS2)
TMNT (PSP)
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (PC)
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas (Xbox 360)
Touch the Dead DS (DS)
Wario Ware: Smooth Moves (Wii)
Yoshi's Island DS (DS)

When we first introduced futures contracts on games, we had a policy in which the futures would expire at 0 DKP if their underlying games did not make the NPD Top 10. The reason was that if the game didn't make the Top 10, we would have no data to settle the contract. However, the fact that the contract has a risk of expiring at 0 DKP, financially, traders would have to discount the price of the contract for the risk of the contract having no recovery value at all. In this case, contracts would always be under-forecasting unit sales to account for this risk. The price of the future would no longer be directly forecasting the number of units to be sold.

We worked with the NPD Group to be able get sales data for any games we listed as futures contracts so that traders would not have to risk a contract expiring at 0 DKP.

Recently, a number of games listed as stocks on the simExchange have had rumors of cancellation. If a game is cancelled, then a game would sell no copies. As logic would have it, the stock should be worth 0 DKP.

Two problems arose. The first is the same as the previous example in which stock prices would always have to account for the risk of cancellation and so their prices would no longer be direct unit sales forecasts.

The second is that games may never have a confirmed cancellation. After all, Duke Nukem Forever has been in "development" for over a decade. This would result in a stock hanging in limbo at a heavily discounted price that is difficult to interpret. If a publisher chooses to use the stock price for judging the game's potential and decide whether to cancel the game or not, they would have to decipher how much of the stock's discounted price is a result of their own pending cancellation decision.

Ideally, we would like the price of a stock or future to be free of any factor other than the unit sales forecasted. To do this, we have established the following policies:

If a game is confirmed to be delayed outside of the time frame of its futures contract, then all trades on that futures contract will be refunded at original price. This way, traders will never have to price the risk of delay into the price of the futures contract.

If a game is confirmed to be cancelled, then all trades on the futures contract or the stock will be refunded at original price. This way, traders will never have to price the risk of cancellation into the price of the futures contract.

Now what if a game is only rumored to be cancelled or delayed? In this case, you shouldn't be trading any differently as if the game is guaranteed to come out because you are fully protected by a refund.

Currently, there are three stocks listed on the simExchange that have been marred by cancellation rumors. They are Project H.A.M.M.E.R. (Wii), The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion (PSP), and Shenmue Online (PC). No policy had been established regarding cancellations during these game's trading lifetimes, so players traded under the assumption that the stocks would be valued at 0 DKP if the games are confirmed to be cancelled. However, prior to the cancellation rumors, these stocks were all relatively low traded.

We offer the following solution for these three games: Roll back / Refund all trades in the history of these three stocks and delist them. Many players made large gains shorting the stocks when the rumors hit, but these same players have also lost a lot by shorting so low, any rise in the stock results in massive losses. We will allow the community to discuss this solution for these three games through 11PM on Wednesday August 29. If the community is generally happy with this decision, then we will refund all trades for these three games.

UPDATE August 25, 2007: Based on the current discussion, it appears the community would favor cashing out and delisting the three stocks rather than issuing refunds. To determine the cash out price, we would use the same algorithm we use for determining IPO prices. Based on the trading of these three stocks since their cancellation rumors emerged, the cash out prices would be:

Project H.A.M.M.E.R. (Wii)	3.63 DKP
The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion (PSP)	7.88 DKP
Shenmue Online (PC)	6.91 DKP

The simExchange Research's July Review Report is now available. You can also sign up to receive future reports via email.