Advanced Features

Go to the Basic Rules.

Short Sales

Summary:
Sell stock you don't own in the hopes that it'll drop before you have to buy it back.

To go short on a stock, simply click the "Short order OK?" box (Advanced Order Form) when you place an order to sell stock you don't own.

When selling short, you actually sell shares you don't own with the promise to return the shares at a later date. If the stock drops in price, you will come out ahead when you buy back the stocks. What you're actually doing is borrowing shares of stock, which you return when you buy back (cover) the short.

However, to protect against the chance that the stock skyrockets, the market requires a deposit on your short position. When you short, the purchase price of the order will be reserved from your available cash. The proceeds from the sale are also held in reserve. So it costs you as much to short, say, 1000 shares as it would cost to buy it. But when you buy back the shorted stock, all the money in reserve will be credited to you at that time. So if the stock has dropped, you make money.

For all practical purposes, going short is the mirror image of standard stock buying (also called going long). If a team that you've shorted pays a dividend, you will OWE that dividend on each share, and it will be deducted from your cash balance.

(If you're long stock, you can place an order to sell MORE of that stock than you own. The market sees this as two orders: One order to sell what you own and another order to short the remainder, i.e. if you sell 3000 shares of BBONS, and you only own 1000, the confirmation screen will display two orders: one to sell 1000 shares of BBONS and one to short 2000 shares of BBONS.)

Limit Orders

Summary:
Place an order that won't execute until the stock reaches the price you desire.

Limit orders are fairly straightforward. If you know you would be willing to buy or sell a stock at a certain price, place a limit order for the stock at that price (your limit price). When the stock reaches that price, your order will execute automatically and you'll receive an email confirming the execution. Thus a valid limit buy order would have a limit price below the current stock price, and a valid limit sell order's limit price would be above the current price.

Stock prices are all valued to the nearest 16th of a dollar, so when you enter the limit price, the execution price may be slightly different. All decimal values entered will be rounded to the nearest sixteenth.

Options

Summary
Puts and calls are the right to sell or buy a stock at a certain price sometime in the future. They usually offer the opportunity to take a greater risk on your short-term hunches.

When you purchase an option (puts and calls), you are purchasing the right to sell (with a put) or buy (with a call) a certain stock at a certain price at a certain point in the future. An option comes with a strike price and a date of maturity. When the option matures, you will have the right to exercise your option by buying or selling the stock at the strike price.

A good example is last September when Pauly bought a bunch of puts on the Dodgers for 40 bucks each. These were September $1100 puts, which meant that on September 30th he could sell shares of LOSAN for $1100 a pop, no matter what their market price was. They were pretty cheap cause a lot of traders figured the Dodgers would make the playoffs and so on the 30th their stock would go for a lot more than $1100. Of course you all know the story, L.A. didn't get into the playoffs, they were only worth $1005 a share, which meant Pauly made $95 on every option. He could have just shorted the stock, but this was a greater return on his investment.

Pauly loves this stuff.

Remember: PUT = right to SELL; CALL = right to BUY. If the stock drops, you make money on a put. If the stock rises, you make money on a call.

Commodities

Summary:
Invest in a single stat of a player.

Commodities act as specialized stock whose value is solely dependent upon a single player's stat--for example, CBIGH is stock in Craig Biggio's homeruns. As you'd expect, commodities delist at the end of the season at the value of that particular stat; if Biggio hits 25 homers, a share of CBIGH will delist at $18.75, no matter how many bases he steals.

Commodities stocks are usually issued by players who produce diverse stats. A player whose value depends largely on a single stat, such as home runs, probably won't issue any commodity stock.

As a side note, the Bosses have been talking for years about creating a futures market for stats, but they haven't worked it out yet. It's hard to get the Bosses to agree on everything.

Delist

Throughout the season, when considering stock values, you savvy traders should always keep in mind that at the end of the season player stocks delist at a value dependent on the stats produced by the player. Team stocks do not delist. Their values are based on the expected dividend returns of $7 per dividend. Player stocks delist according to the following table:

Batters:

Pitchers: So a grand slam, for example, would increase a player's delist value by $2.05 (one HR, one hit, and four RBIs). Home runs may appear to be undervalued, but as you can see, they're not. When the delist happens at the end of the season, in exchange for each share of stock you own in a player, you'll receive cash for the total of all the stats produced by that player according to the list above.

Read the FAQ for more information on the game, the site, and clarifications of rules.



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