We want to let everyone know that we are working on lifting the short-selling ban right now. You will be able to sell-short as you please starting at market open tomorrow. Please let us know if you have any additional questions.

The UpDown Team

Hi Everyone,

Sorry about the trading issues that all of you had to deal with last week.  Basically, for months we have had stable trading because we upgraded our infrastructure to get data directly from the exchanges.  This was working well until Thursday when our servers were overwhelmed with massive and historic trading volume for that day.  On Thursday the market volume was 2.5 times the usual volume.  This volume was the highest in years and perhaps the highest in the entire history of the market.

Because of massive trading volumes, our server processed trades 2 hours behind schedule.  Earlier in the week, we actually saw this coming and ordered new servers on Tuesday to increase our capacity but we couldn’t get the servers up in time to process the trades for Thursday.  Luckily, we get the new servers on Thursday night and trades were processed normally on Friday.  The site should be back to normal from now on.

Phuc, Co-Founder and CTO

The SEC prohibits short selling of 799 financial stocks in order to strengthen investor confidence - and so does UpDown.com.

The list of stocks that cannot be shorted can be found here.

According to a press release issued by the SEC this morning, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said, “The Commission is committed to using every weapon in its arsenal to combat market manipulation that threatens investors and capital markets. The emergency order temporarily banning short selling of financial stocks will restore equilibrium to markets. This action, which would not be necessary in a well-functioning market, is temporary in nature and part of the comprehensive set of steps being taken by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the Congress.”

We’ll keep you posted on any changes regarding these restrictions.

Michael

e need to clarify the issue of having multiple accounts on UpDown. Given the arrival of the Contests feature, we understand that demand is higher than ever for the ability to manage multiple portfolios under one account. Some members are responding by creating multiple UpDown accounts in order to have access to multiple portfolios to use for categorized contests (i.e. only green energy stocks, ETF’s, etc.) and for testing several investing strategies.

We are already working on making it possible for you to manage multiple portfolios and to designate one of your portfolios for earning real money. Once this is in place, you will be able to participate in all of those special contests and test all of your strategies, while still having the opportunity to earn real money for your performance.

In the meantime, we ask you to refrain from claiming money on multiple accounts on UpDown. Doing so would be an attempt at getting paid multiple times for your performance, which would not be fair to everyone on the Community. If you do claim money on multiple accounts, we will ask you to keep one of your accounts and to shut down the others.

Thank you for your cooperation and stay on the lookout for this upgrade. It is coming soon!

The UpDown Team