Above is a quick snapshot of our market page during a recent Thursday night football game. This is a view of the Top 30 tab, which always shows the 30 stocks with the largest positive change for the day. This is the only tab that automatically sorts this way- the individual sport tabs can be sorted other ways, depending on what you want at the time. Above the market you can see which portfolio you're currently in- use the dropdown to change, if needed. If you want to look at a specific sport, simply click that tab.

If you're on a specific sport tab, you can click a column header to sort by that information (click a 2nd time to reverse the order). Say you wanted to see what players were listed for the Edmonton Oilers- click the NHL tab, then click Team at the top and look for the E's (there are page links at the bottom of the market). What all information are you seeing here? Besides the name, you see the team (with some sports position group as well- i.e. NFLD is NFL defensive player), ticker symbol, the number of shares bought and sold for the day (the market resets at noon easter), the percentage and corresponding dollar amount the stock has gained or lost for the day, the stock's price when the day's dividends hit at 9am eastern, and the stock's current price.

If you see a stock in the market and want more information about him, you can simply click his name to be taken to his profile page (which we'll cover on another page here). If you were using what we simply call Market2, you'd even be able to buy that stock by clicking on its row somewhere other than the name without leaving the page and the stock would appear grey if you were already holding shares of that stock in your active portfolio.

Now, just because a stock is being purchased doesn't mean it's a stock you should purchase. However, it certainly might be an indicator that you should look to see what, of note, that player has done today that others are buying. After all, even a golfer who had a bad overall round might have dropped in a hole-in-one or something that'll earn him a significant dividend in the morning and you don't want to miss out!

A reminder here- just like buying stocks in the real world, buying stocks here carries a commission cost. One of the reasons we do this is so that people can't simply just swap the stocks in their portfolio; they have to think about whether the purchase is worth the commission before they buy. Our commission is 1% per transaction with a $50 minimum (but then we gave you $1mil, yes?).

But the key to playing this game isn't whether you buy the stocks everyone else is buying, it's how well you're investing the dollars you have available to you. If you're an active player, you'll 'turn over' your entire portfolio on a daily basis (spend all your cash today, sell all your stocks in the morning, do it all over again tomorrow....the 'lather, rinse, repeat' method). That doesn't mean you have to play that actively, just that the more actively you trade, the faster your portfolio's value will increase...assuming, of course, you're not making bad investments!

One more thing of note here- on the market you might see stocks with share prices in the thousands of dollars. We had lower prices in the past, but currently if a stock is at (or a dividend causes it to reach) $10,000 per share at dividend time, the stock splits 10:1. While you won't need to know much about this early on (since you'll usually not want to tie up the cash when your portfolio is relatively small), it's still good to know what's going on. When a stock splits, whatever shares you are holding is multiplied by 10 while the price per share is divided by 10. This means the dollar amount of your investment doesn't change, but you might be now holding more shares than you could otherwise legally buy. Remember, we have a cap of 10,000 shares of any one stock on buys but if you attain more than 10,000 shares via a stock split, it's perfectly legal, even adviseable, to hold them.

Ok, let's move on- the next section to click would be Player Profiles.