In most NCAA tournament contests, you make your picks before any games are played, and then just sit back and watch the results. At best, you get to pick winners round-by-round. Try a different kind of contest, where you buy and sell stocks of NCAA teams in real time, like a day trader. When a heavy favorite falls behind by 10 points at halftime, do you sell your stock, or buy more? You get do make those kinds of decisions as you watch the games.

Here are the rules:
* There's no real money on the line...this is just for fun and bragging rights!
* Each participant gets $2,500 of play money to invest. If you lose it all, you're done. At the end of the tournament, the person with the most money wins.
* After each round, each share of a surviving team will pay out the following dividends:
Play-in: none
1st round: $10
2nd round: $30 (cumulative $40)
Regional semifinal: $60 (cumulative $100)
Regional final: $150 (cumulative $250)
National semifinal: $250 (cumulative $500)
National championship: $500 (cumulative $1,000)
* The dividend will be deducted from the stock price (you will get cash, but lose stock value).
* The stock price for each team will be set mathematically, to reflect expected future dividends. When a team loses, its' stock is worthless.
* Stock prices will change constantly, based on results of all games, including those in progress.
* In addition to individual team stocks, some mutual funds that are combinations of team stocks will be available.
* Short-selling is not allowed.
* You can only buy or sell whole shares of a stock or fund, not partial shares.
* You may hold at most 5 teams or funds at any one time.
* You cannot hold more than 99 shares of any stock or fund at a time.
* You cannot obtain more than $1,000 of any stock or fund by buying, but if a stock goes up to give you over $1,000 of it, that's fine.
* The number of trades each participant can make during the first week of the tournament is limited to 25; however, selling your entire holding of a team or fund doesn't count against this limit. Trade limits in future weeks will be set later, based on the number of participants.
* During a game, trades on participating teams are only allowed during full timeouts, or at halftime. After the "under-4" official timeout in the second half, no more trading is allowed on that game, unless it goes to overtime.
* In the final 4 minutes of a potential major upset, all trading may be suspended.

The initial prices for each team will be posted tomorrow. After that, you can start buying at any point.

3/11/2007 4:39:48 PM

sounds like too much damn work to do while trying to keep track of all the games.

3/11/2007 4:40:45 PM

Might be, although 25 "buys" per week works out to less than one for every hour that the tourney's on TV. If nobody's interested, than that's cool. It's something different, so I'll try it and see.

3/11/2007 4:47:57 PM

sounds like too much damn work to do while trying to keep track of all the games.

3/11/2007 4:48:17 PM

this

will go nowhere

3/11/2007 4:51:45 PM

if this were automated on some website, it might cool.

but on a messageboard? no way in hell.

3/11/2007 4:53:32 PM

is there a website or something?

3/11/2007 4:53:34 PM

No website...I'm a math major, not comp-sci.

3/11/2007 4:55:14 PM