Three days into our currency trading contest in collaboration with FXCM, we take a first look at the top performers.

Congrats to post robert, Seelenbinder Luke, and Wartak Josiah – great job!

[Performance as of 3/3/2010, 4:12pm EST]

However everything is still open and you can still win, too! If you have not joined yet, no problem, you can still join the contest until the end of the month.

Many of you have been asking us for currency trading and here it is!

During March we will host our 1st Currency Trading Contest and FXCM is sponsoring it.

The first prize is a$2,000 funded FXCM account, the second prize is a $1,000 funded FXCM account.

The contest runs from 3/1/2010 to 3/31/2010 – and you can trade 24h!

Anyone can join now by filling out the sign-up form and downloading the FXCM trading platform.

We’ll also help you out with some articles and videos to get started with currency trading.

Well done!

Congrats to the winners of our yearly contest:
1. Frank Bianchini
2. Pete Andersen
3. Filius Bonacci

Congratulations to all the other winners and the more than 40,000 participants in the contest!

Even though retirement is some time away for some of our members, I thought this site might be useful:

Observing how people were watching their IRA’s, 401k’s, etc. diminish in value, and sharing their frustration over not knowing what to do, eRollover co-founders Corbett Gilliam and Mike Rowan recognized the need to fill this void.

Following their tag line, “Retirement planning. Evolved.,”they established eRollover.com in June, 2008, providing content rich retirement fund information previously available to the general public only through financial services professionals. Their “secret sauce” as they describe it, is an eAggregator, which allows people to easily consolidate multiple retirement fund accounts onto the automated eRollover online platform, eliminating the need to visit multiple individual sites to manage, interact, and transact. eRollover Members can now securely obtain retirement fund data from more than 9,400 sources, including banks & brokerages.

We are fully aware of the portfolio performance issue that’s been plaguing our July contest. Couple things happened that caused the spikes in affected portfolios. The issue originated from a data issue from our vendor. We did not get a data feed of AIG 20:1 reverse split on July 1st until late in the morning. So, portfolios that had AIG holdings on 6/30 had a huge increase in performance all of a sudden. The huge gains (250%+) you saw on July contest leaderboard were due to this issue. Second issue is we had a bug in our batch fixing code that retroactively corrects portfolios with missed stock split transaction. After our initial correction on July 1st, we discovered the AIG split were handled twice on a number of portfolio. This explains why some users still had huge gains and some users had big loses after July 1st. We have fixed the bug and have been auditing and fixing each affected portfolio manually. That’s why some of you may still have performance issue with your portfolio. All affected portfolios should be fixed by the end of this week. Please continue to send us email at contact@updown.com if you believe your portfolio still have performance issue. We are working diligently to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

We have just released a new commission schedule to further improve our real world trading simulation.

From now on, the commission for a trade will be calculated the following way: For trades below 1,000 shares, the commission will be $10 flat. For trades above 1,000 shares, the commission will be $10 + $0.01 for each share in excess of 1,000 shares. For example, a 1,500 share trade will incur a $15 commission (1,500 – 1,000) * $0.01 + $10 = $15.

This commission schedule is more realistic, as it makes high volume trades more expensive. In the real market, a large order would influence the stock price – this is now simulated on UpDown with a higher commission.

We’ve just released an update to UpDown.com which included a new stock ticker, an updated home page, and an overall design improvement.

The stock ticker shows the stocks in your portfolio and watch list and stocks you’ve recently checked out on UpDown. The new home page that you see before logging in has more information on the market and what’s currently happening on UpDown.

Let us know what you think.

Michael

I wanted to point out a great summer program for anyone interested in starting or advancing their Wall Street career: finance training plus a guaranteed finance internship.

First, you get to brush up your financial skills in a Three-week intensive finance training program covering accounting, consolidated financial statements modeling, mergers and acquisitions modeling, leveraged buyouts and valuation.

Then, you get to apply them in the real world during a Guaranteed four-week internship at a premier private equity or venture capital fund.

Up to 15 qualified candidates will be able to join this program this summer. UpDown members get a 5% discount.

Learn more here.

We’ve launched a significant improvement to our trading system today that makes trading on UpDown even more realistic: partial fills.

So far, all orders were executed in one batch regardless of their volume, allowing for substantial volume trades of even lower volume stocks in seconds. Now, orders will get executed based on the volume that is traded in the real stock market.

Small orders of high volume stocks (i.e. 1,000 shares of Apple (AAPL)), will still be executed immediately. However, the execution of a large order of a low volume stock will happen over time as the volume becomes available.

For more info, check out the new paragraph on partial fills in our help section.

Looking forward to your feedback!

In today’s release we have changed the UpDown navigation and have also given it a new look and feel.We’ve also released our new Education Center.

The goal of the new navigation is to make navigating the site easier and allow faster access to your portfolio. All the trading features (your portfolio, trading, the watch list, and your performance) can be found under the new navigation item “Trading“. The new “Community” section hosts information about other members, your friends, groups, and networks.

A substantial number of you have asked for more learning content. Today, we launch our Education Center which I hope will be a great resource for beginners and advanced investors. For now, it contains a glossary, an investing 101 section, and an overview of the services that different online brokers offer. You can also contribute by suggesting additional glossary terms or writing a review for your stock broker.

Let us know what you think.