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Strategies & Market Trends : Picks of the quarter -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (7333)	3/30/2009 3:57:33 PM
From: Taro	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20435

Man, I'm (still) a 25% bovine candidate myself :) Expect to be fully invested by Wed as well. That said, my 25% IKAN is doing pretty good today... Taro

To: Cogito who wrote (7333)	3/31/2009 7:46:48 PM
From: Sr K	Respond to of 20435

maybe "set me up with a 25% position" threw him. You can use 25% of your cash or $25 of your cash, but your position would be shares at the closing price (your Opening Price), and it will fluctuate and not be a 25% position except initially and maybe rarely later. So you can't buy a 25% position. It's like the bank WARNING "MAY FLUCTUATE". There are only 4 possible equity orders: Buy Sell Buy To Cover Sell Short I think we should be strict and orders not properly placed should be void. The placing of orders accurately and as intended is about 50% of the value of this game, IMO. The first time (or the next time) you place a real world order for the wrong security or wrong direction or wrong limit price (or forget to make an order a Limit Order), you may see what I mean. Look at your online broker Order screen. Those are the choices, if you are set up allowing short sales. The percentage in an order is used to allocate among several stocks in an order. Like, with all my cash buy 50% ABC and 50% DEF; or 40% in ABC and 30% in DEF and 30% in GHI. Your order would be easy and clear for Elroy by saying: With $25 of my cash, buy BCON. That way, he doesn't have to look up your cash and make a calculation of how much is being invested. It seems obvious either way at the start of a game, but the less Elroy has to wonder what someone means, or convert it into what he needs to know, the better. In his spreadsheet, for each player for each security he plugs in a dollar amount invested, and subtracts that dollar amount (or cell value) from the cash position (a cell); and pulls up the closing price for that stock, which is stored as the Cost for that stock. Later in the game there is an extra step when a stock is sold and 1% is subtracted to calculate the net proceeds available for investing or placing into the cash position. He values the Cash at $1.00 per share and computes the "shares" of cash held. The spreadsheet calculates the shares by dividing the invested amount by the Cost (the opening price). The Price (closing price) goes into another column which gets updated at the time of each subsequent valuation. The latest Value (long or short) is calculated by using: PP=Purchasing Price, DP=Price of the Day. and Long: PP+(DP-PP) ---- this equals the DP for a long position Short: PP+(PP-DP) ---- this goes up as DP goes down and multiplying the shares times the appropriate Value. The spreadsheet calculates the percentage change for each position. All the individual valuations (including the cash position) are totaled to give the portfolio value. Elroy's spreadsheet also makes the aggregate calculations, and formats the Player and Game results into the periodic report we see. MOL AFAIK.