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
Congratulations to 007wall-street, the winner of The UpDown Official Q3 Contest!
Since the contest was open to the entire UpDown Community, 007wall-street truly showed off his investing prowess by becoming the Q3 Champion. He beat the second place finisher by over 400%!
007wall-street has been a top investor on UpDown.com since the we launched the site on CNBC in September of 2007. He has offered many insightful stock tips to other members and put together a tremendously successful investing strategy. We would like to personally thank him for taking on such a great leadership role since the very beginning. Congratulations again from the entire UpDown Team!
Here is a list of the stocks bought and sold most by the top 100 performing investors on UpDown.com from market close on Friday, September 19th through market close on Friday, September 26th.
Most Bought:
1. JPM - JP Morgan Chase & Co.
2. NCC - National City Corp.
3. RIMM - Research in Motion Ltd.
4. WMT - Wall-Mart Stores, Inc.
5. WM - Washington Mutual Inc.
Most Sold:
1. SCA - Syncora Holdings Ltd.
2. MER - Merryl Lynch & Co., Inc.
3. SPY - SPDR Trust, Series 1 ETF
4. ETFC - E-Trade Financial Corp.
5. GOLD - Randgold Resources Ltd.
Invest well this week!
The UpDown Team
With the election season upon us, we thought it would be fun to form Updown.com online investment groups for Democrats and Republicans to see who the better investors are. The intention of the groups is to invest a portfolio according to the principles and policies of each party, and see which ends up with higher return.
So far the Republicans are up slightly. The race is as tight as Obama vs. McCain.
If you’re interested in joining, follow these links for the groups:
Demoratic Party Investing Group
Republican Party Investing Group
Joe Ranft, VP Product & Design, My UpDown Profile
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
We are having problems with our trading system.
All trades will be executed properly, but may take hours to show up on the site.
Please do not cancel trades in order to have them placed. This will just cause your trade to execute at a new price and for the trade to take even longer to go through.
Also, we do not recommend any day trading strategies until we clear up this problem.
We hope to have this problem resolved by the end of the day.
Sorry about this.
The UpDown Team
Just when we thought the government had said, “Enough is enough,” it goes and takes over AIG in an $85 billion bailout. What does this mean for our financial system and capitalism in general? To begin to answer this question, check out this discussion on “bailout capitalism” from Seeking Alpha.
Brendan
UpDown Team
Hi Everyone,
As I’m sure you have noticed, our trading system is running behind. Your trades are pending and executing much later than they should. Delays like this happen most often in the first or last few minutes of trading when we have a ton of orders at once, just like we did yesterday following Black Monday on Wall Street.
These delays are inexcusable and we are working as hard as we can to fix them. In the meantime, please keep in mind that even if the system is delayed, your trade still executes at the correct price, and canceling and re-entering trades will only delay your trade further.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Regards,
Brendan
UpDown Team
brendan@updown.com
What a day to start the contest! As dark as today was for Wall Street, there were many great investors who still found a way to make a lot of money. Here are the students who best navigated this stormy day:
