Polidex is back – and its tweaked. Apparently the programmer has had a crash course in market economics and has tried to make it emulate a real market more. Players can now post bids and offers and go short. Although I suspect it will still need more tweaking – the short borrowing rate is rather high at 1/2% per day or 182% per annum (617% per annum if its compounded – which seems a little bit over base rate. Assuming I understand the new rules correctly). Olly the geek explains;

The biggest change you’ll notice is the game-play is vastly different. In a sense it’s simpler, but it’s probably a little more advanced to play. Essentially, you can only make a profit by selling your shares on to another player. In that way, it’s a lot more like the real stock-market: you offer to buy a share at a particular price and someone may or may not sell it to you at that price.

There is another way to make money; that’s by selling short. Apparently I should have learnt this in my A Level economics class, but I don’t remember it (I didn’t do that well at Economics). If you understand selling short, skip this paragraph. Selling short is where you sell something you don’t own. So in share terms, you sell shares that you’ve got on loan from someone else. The idea is that at the end of your loan period you can buy them back at a cheaper price and you make a profit on the difference between the price you sold them and the price you bought them back. This means that you can make a profit on shares that lose value.

Restarting January 30!

Our Bloggers league looks like it has been zeroed. So fresh start everyone…



The League of Bloggers:

Willhowells, spicer, qwghlm, le_poulet_noir, jonball, jdc, jamesgraham, foggyweb, doctorvee, causauk, britspin, artesea, Unity, UK Future, TsunamiCD, Swordsman, Stuart Bruce, Ripefig, Recess Monkey, Nosemonkey, NoSurrender, NickBarlow, Larryred, Lagwolf, Jamesw, Guido Fawkes, DirtyDen, Chris B, Bird of Liberty, Azeem Azhar, Assemblybird, Anthony Wells, AndyT.