Yesterday we found out from CNBC that the wizards were cheating... Well not exactly. To quote CNBC, they were not playing "in the spirit" of the competition. They were caught exploiting the "Refer a friend" bonus feature which earned them $1000 for every friend referred. And exploit it they did, with the top player reaching well above the $600,000 mark, putting his/her total number of referrals in the range of 400! That's a lot of friends - or a lot of dummy email accounts.
Thanks to the swift action of CNBC, the loop-hole is rectified and total earnings from "Refer a friend" bonuses are now limited to $20,000. What's more, the extra bonuses earned by the abusers have been trimmed away (If you didn't refer more than 20 people, you've nothing to fear).
So I've got to say, good work CNBC. Action was taken quickly and we didn't end up needing a petition, as one reader suggested. I don't think the abusers had enough time to make significant stock gains with their bonuses and most likely they were spending that time opening new accounts rather than making good trades.
So now it's back to a fair game... or is it? Do you think the abusers have already gained an edge? Do you think the rule change was fair? Did your account get "trimmed"?
Friday, November 16, 2007
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2 comments:
Well, yesterday I would have said that the cheats had already gained an edge. It is irrational to suggest that someone with ~$600K to throw around would not have had an edge over someone with ~$140K, even for only two or three days.
Yesterday, all of the early cheats were still in top 200, even after they had been taxed of their ill-gotten gains.
Now, however, I've just checked the top 500, and ran a search for the names of the top 3 original conspirators. They aren't on the list at all.
I can only speculate they've been given the bums rush for good???
To be fair on the cheaters, they didn't all get to $600,000 and they didn't have that level of cash for 2 or 3 days. Also, on the one day they had $600,000 to "throw around" the S&P ASX 300 index fell.
Now I'm not saying that they didn't have an edge during that time, of course they did. But I am saying that the chances are that they weren't able to take advantage of it.
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