e have upgraded our contest feature again. Now you can run your own investing contests against your family, coworkers, and friends at any time on UpDown.com.

Many of you are familiar with fantasy sports and especially fantasy football, the most popular fantasy sport on the web. You have set up a league and competed against your friends and found out who among you was the best football general manager. Now on UpDown, you can conduct your own investing contests with anyone you choose to see who is the best investor. CNBC now has even more reason to call us where “fantasy football meets the trading floor!“

Before this upgrade, you could participate in organized contests on UpDown only if you were a college student, like the thousands competing in the Summer 2008 $10,000 Student Investment Contest. While we will still hold these community-wide contests, we are happy to now provide all UpDown members with the opportunity to compete with whoever they want!

The UpDown Team

e have implemented a new trading rule to make your UpDown.com trading experience even more lifelike.

Our new Clearing Rule restricts actions on portfolio positions until the volume of your trade clears in the real marketplace. For example, if you buy 100,000 shares of a stock, you now have to wait for 100,000 shares of that stock to trade in the real marketplace before you can sell those shares. This will prevent UpDown members from making trades at unrealistic volumes and profiting from small changes in price.

The rule will affect you only if you trade low volume stocks in very high volumes over short periods of time. Most UpDown members will never come across it.

Again, the Clearing Rule is in place to better simulate real-world conditions so you can get the most out of your trading experience on UpDown.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments about this new rule!

The UpDown Team

e have eliminated pending trades from UpDown! All of the trades in your UpDown portfolio will now execute immediately. You will never again have to wait to act on a position because it is “pending.”

This enhancement to the UpDown platform makes your trading experience much more lifelike. We must still hide the execution price of your trades for 15-20 minutes due to stock exchange regulations, but your cash balance will immediately reflect the real-time price of your trade.

Eliminating pending trades has been the UpDown Community’s most requested enhancement. We are very happy to deliver it to you!

Go to your UpDown portfolio and start trading now!

The UpDown Team