Go to the The Advanced Features .... Short Sales and Limit Orders

Read the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).

The game in brief:

It's a securities exchange, like the NASDAQ, only all the securities are issued on NFL players and teams. Unlike fantasy football, your portfolio can be invested in teams as well as players. The market doesn't close at the end of the regular season, either. Teams and players who appear in post-season games don't delist their stocks (turn them into cash) until they're out for good. The stocks all delist at a value derived from the stats produced by the player or team. In addition, the team stocks pay cash dividends whenever the team wins a game.

Of course, most of the profits in the market are made on speculation. DEMAND for a stock is all that drives its price up and down, until the day that the stock delists according to its stats. Which means that even if a player is racking up stats left and right, if his expectations are low and everyone sells his stock, it'll be cheap. And that's why you gotta stay on top of this market if you want to build your fortune.

How to join the game:

Joining the game is easy to do and it doesn't cost you a dime of real money.

When you join, the Bosses lend you $2 million to start your portfolio. The Bosses will want that $2 million back eventually, so if you want to win prizes, your portfolio has to grow. Once you get your money, you will be given full, unrestricted access to the Major League Market's Football Floor. That's when you can start building your empire.

Please note that each trader may only have one Football Floor account at a time. Traders with multiple accounts will lose all eligibility for prizes and will have their accounts deleted.

Your Portfolio:

Click the 'portfolio' link to view your portfolio. You will get a listing of your available cash, all your stock holdings, and your total portfolio worth. This is also the page from which you can do account-related things like change your password, check limit order and dividend payment history, etc.

Transactions:

There's a few ways to trade.

1. You can go short or long on any stock.
2. Any order can be a market order or a limit order.

Anyone with enough brain activity to breathe can figure out the basics. Buy a stock. Wait for it to go up. Sell it. How hard is that? That's what we call a long order--it's the basic stock order.

Short sales are also very simple. If you think a stock is going to go down instead of up, short sell it. To be brief, this means that you borrow shares, sell them, and then buy them back later. If your little hunch was correct, you have an extra hunk of cash left over. If you want I should get specific about that, check out the rules on short selling in the Advanced Features.

Limit orders are also described in the Advanced Features section. Plenty of money can be made without them, but avid traders will want to get acquainted with them. The advanced features of the Market provide for more complex activity, but they are not necessary for traders to play.

Commissions:

The Bosses' fee for each transaction is 0.5% of the entire transaction amount.

Taxes:

The Major League Market ain't got taxes. The Bosses and the IRS have a special relationship.

How to place orders:

It's set up so even you inexperienced traders should be able to intuit how to use it. But here's a couple notes of explanation.

To view information on a stock, enter the symbol and click the "STOCK PROFILE" button. This will not submit your order. The stock profile will give you up to the minute information on an individual stock.

The rest of the order form is easy to use. Enter the stock symbol, the number of shares you wish to buy or sell, and submit the order by clicking the button titled "Place this Order". After you submit the order, a confirmation screen will appear. It will summarize the order, the cost to you, and ask you to cancel or confirm the order.

To use any of the advanced trading features, access the advanced order form by clicking on the tab which says ... you guessed it: "Get Advanced Order Form". This order form is almost identical, but provides the option to sell short and to place the order as a limit order. Read the advanced features for more about these trade options.

We got five kinds of securities on the Major League Market.

Commodities are described in the Advanced Rules section.

How the market works:

The Major League Market is based on the underground economy of the Bosses. They financially fueled the NFL from the back rooms for decades before finally making their exchange open to anyone who wanted to invest. Teams and players issue stocks to the Major League Market for investment by the Bosses. The Bosses also run the exchange, including enforcement of the Insider Trading Floor rules. It's like they got their own little SEC for themselves. Sort of. They use different means of coercion. Let's not go into that.

How are these stocks valued? Good question. I'm glad I asked it. The football players are the cornerstone of the market. Each player spends the season racking up certain statistics--which are also known here as commodities--and at the end of the season those stats are worth a certain amount. Yards gained and points scored are counted towards a player's value.

At the end of the season, the player cashes in all his commodities. Then each share of his stock delists off of the exchange, paying a certain amount of cash for each stat produced that season. It's important to remember that the players produce these commodities throughout the season including playoffs.

Teams, on the other hand, are large, powerful organizations that own more player stock than any one of us could ever imagine seeing in our lifetime. Since they're big and resourceful, they do something with the players they own--they generate wins, and that's worth something. Every time a team wins a game, that team's stock pays out $5 per share per point of margin of the win. On the spot. Consider it a dividend. For example, if Green Bay pounds the snot out of Tampa Bay 30-10, anyone holding Green Bay stock would receive a dividend of $100 per share since Green Bay won by 20 points.

Dividends heat up in the postseason. The League is much more appreciative of teams that win playoff games. Wild card games pay dividends at the same rate as regular season games. The benefit of an extra dividend is inherent. However, the rest of the playoff games pay much more. Each playoff game win pays a $25 dividend per point of margin of the win. The teams have much more at stake during the playoffs, and they pay accordingly.

Player stocks on playoff teams also increase in value, because those players get to play more games. Things get real juiced up around here when teams start clinching division titles, believe me. Used to be fights would break out every night.

How closely you want to pay attention to each commodity's value is up to you. Lots of people make money on the world's stock exchanges simply by buying stock in companies they think have potential for improvement--they don't always dig deeply into the company's accounting. Same with the Major League Market: if you buy some Barry Sanders stock and he turns out to lead the league again in rushing yards, you're gonna make money. If your Bret Farve throws 4 TDs against Minnesota, you know your net worth went up that day.

But other investors like to know where each dollar is coming from--and they'll use those numbers to their advantage. The League pays a specific amount per share of stock, for each of the stats--two cents per yard gained and one dollar for each point scored. Defense stocks pay two cents for each tackle, a dollar for each sack, and four dollars for each interception. (See entire stat payoff list)

How stocks delist:

When a stock delists, the total value of all the stats produced by the player is "cashed in". If you own the stock at the time of delist, you will receive into your account an amount of cash equal to the total value of all the stats produced by the player. You can read the stat values in the advanced features.

Up until the date of the stock's delist, the only reason a stock's price will change is if traders want to buy or sell. Even if Jerry Rice was on pace to break the single season TD record for a receiver, his stock won't change in price unless the traders believe he can keep it up. If the traders think an impending injury (as a hypothetical example of course) will cut him short they won't be buying his stock and it won't go up, no matter how many points he scores. Of course, eventually, the traders will all turn around if he keeps it up, and anyone who bought the stock early on will make a huge profit.

And that's the essence of how the market works.

Restrictions on trading

Read about the Advanced Features

Read the Frequently Asked Questions



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