No IPOs for the week of July 9

There will be no stock IPOs on the simExchange for the week of July 9. Part of the reason is to shift trading activity to the futures contracts. As you may have noticed, the simExchange has been emphasizing the futures contracts lately with redesigns to the site.

The reason we have been putting more attention on the futures contracts is that after collaborating with the NPD Group, people in the video game industry, and those who cover it on Wall Street, we have learned that short-term unit sales data is much more relevant to the video game industry. Lifetime global sales are hard to judge and not as informative to the industry because it does not detail when the sales will occur (within a publisher's fiscal quarter) and at what price the games will be sold (to forecast revenue). The NPD Group has been very kind to provide us unit sales data to settle our futures contracts to make short-term forecasts possible for the US market.

In the future, we will be using stocks to better judge which games we want to list as futures each month to concentrate trading and provide more accurate forecasts.