Hey Guys/Gals that run this site:

I realize this is just a demo site and isn’t meant to be taken too seriously. That having been said, it’s just sooooo easy to manipulate the markets on here that the predictive value of any given forecast is pretty much meaningless. Not sure there’s much you can do about that but it does kind of take the fun out of it. Just sayin…

The reason the market is easily manipulated, or appears so, is because there needs to be a certain volume - and a number of traders - to allow the market to calm down… the bigger the ship the better it handles storms.

Jeff – if you have several accounts, it is indeed possible to manipulate the outcome of the market; just like in the real stock market if you had lots of “market makers” colluding, you could manipulate a stock price, and on our public marketplace, this is more possible because it’s easier for people to sign up with multiple email addresses.

That said, there are some things we’re doing now to highlight suspicious activity and we’ve been more active about disabling the accounts of those that are clearly cheating. Also, in a corporate setting, this would be a non-issue as they would only be allowing corporate.com email addresses to play and i don’t know many corporations where each person has 10 accounts or even 2.