Dear all members, users, friends and foes of Tipping Monkey,

It is with strong emotions that I am writing to let everyone know that as of December 1, 2009, we will be officially discontinuing the Tipping Monkey service. The main reason for discontinuation is simply the fact that we have not been able to achieve the level of membership and traffic to sustain our operations, and with the proliferation of new competitors in the same space as ours, we just did not feel that it is sensible to maintain the manpower and financial commitment to continue operations for Tipping Monkey. It’s been a very, very tough decision indeed. I wanted to thank everyone who has been using our service, sending feedback, and supporting us in general! ...

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Dear members,

It's been a while since we added new features to Tipping Monkey. There have been a number of requests for exporting portfolio data to a user's own compute. So we decided to add that. In the Portfolio Balance Sheet page, you will now see an "Export Portfolio to CSV" link (see image below). Clicking that link will export that portfolio to your computer in CSV (comma-separated values) format. While this is not a very sophisticated format, it is a pretty standard format that many spreadsheets and applications recognize. We felt that should be good enough for most people.

Once again, happy trading, but make sure to INVESTIGATE before you INVEST!

- primate

For months we have been hearing about different types of issues surrounding members not being able to log in to their accounts. This mostly happens when people have a laptop that connect to different networks, or they log in from many different machines, or simply they use Tipping Monkey intermittently between the web interface and inside Facebook.

Either case, we made a fix that we think at least fixed one whole class of issues related to cookie management. We hope this will alleviate some of the pain that some members have been expreiencing.

Happy trading, and thanks for your continued support!

We experienced another glitch recently that took out our option chains again. Options trading is back now ... we apologize for any inconvenience!

Dear all, I apologize for not having been too active on the site lately. With the current markets in such turmoil there is much to distract our attention and a lot to ponder over. Well, I am not immune. I hope I will find the time in the near future to write an extensive update about the developments with Tipping Monkey, but I wanted to thank all the loyal members who continue to visit or otherwise support this site.

But first things first, I wanted to let all of you know that Options trading - which is one of the key differentiating features of Tipping Monkey - is back! The main change is that now we've embraced the "@" prefix for option symbols as our quote provider had changed their system. I think this is long overdue and better, since it eliminates the confusion between stock/option symbol clashes, and allows for quick visual disambiguation between stocks, options, and FOREX symbols.

We now also have commodity symbols (denoted with a "/" prefix) that people can "trade" (i.e. buy and sell only). We will be looking at updating the trading engine to see what additional support we need to add for more comprehensive commodities activity. We will be rolling out incremental changes in the next few months. Stay tuned!

We noticed that we have not been posting monthly updates for our King-of-the-Hill winner and Hall-of-Fame inductees for the last few months, but for those of you familiar with our site should know that we've been selecting, rewarding and featuring our monthly King-of-the-Hill T-shirt winners every month. We wanted to apologize for those who have won recently but felt that they did not get the recognition they deserved.

This month, we wanted to start a slightly new format, which includes the official, final Top-10 rankings of the top portfolios of the previous month (calculated after the close of the last trading day of the month). So here it is for August, 2008:

1: JonathanLachapelle (Financials)
2: aaa3036 (UGA Dawgs)
3: LeoWong (Checkers)
4: twinflame (Four to ...

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We have been getting feedback from members for the longest time asking for Limt and Stop Loss Orders. And for those of you who use our site frequently, you might have already noticed the new changes that have gone in recently. That`s right - we listened - and you can now place Limit and Stop Loss orders in addition to market orders.

In the familiar trading screen (image below), you will now see options for placing Market, Limit or Stop Loss orders, as well as an expiration time for an order (denoted with the red boxes). If you are using a Tracking Portfolio, you will also see an option to place User Price Orders (not shown).

The Basics

And here is a quick-and-dirty guide for using these different types of orders.

What is an "option"?

The following is the official definition from the publication "Risks and Characteristics of Standardized Options":

"An option is the right either to buy or to sell a specified amount or value of a particular underlying interest at a fixed exercise price by exercising the option before its specified expiration date. An option which gives a right to buy is a call option, and an option which gives a right to sell is a put option. Calls and puts are distinct types of options, and the buying and selling of one type does not involve the other."

Sounds confusing, huh? If you already have an options trading account with your brokerage, chances are they already sent you a hard copy of this document, but chances are you haven't taken the time to read it. Regardless, you can click here to view the full publication. We strongly recommend you to read it before committing any real money on option trades.

I recently just received a question from a member about trading options with Limit orders. I thought these were good questions so I thought of writing a blog entry to share the answers with everyone.

In the example, the member picked DJWQU, a PUT option on the 1/100 Dow Jones Index (Symbol: DJX) with 125 strike and expiring on May 17. The 1/100 means that the strike prices are 1/100 of the actual DJIA, so in this case, the 125 strike actually refers to 12,500 points on the DJIA. Since the DJWQU is a PUT option, the option will become In-the-money (ITM) when the DJIA goes under 12,500.

At this time, the DJWQU option is reporting a Last price of $0.14, and a Bid/Ask of $0.16/$0.25 respectively. So if someone places a Limit order to buy contracts of DJWQU at $0.15 or less, will that order get filled right away?

Given the above situation, the short answer is NO ...

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Tipping Monkey is really excited to introduce the first freely-available trading simulators that incorporate a market impact element. We are very honored to have a founder and active manager of a rather successful energy hedge fund on our Advisory Board, and this system is the result of several long discussions about real issues that hedge funds face with deployment of capital, proprietary trading and minimizing market impact.

Introduction

As individual investors, many of us buy and sell stokcs in relatively small quantities, usually less than a thousand shares per trade, and rarely more than 10,000 shares (microcap and nanocap traders excluded, of course). These quantities are usually negligible with respect to the stock’s outstanding float - which is the amount of stock that is available for trading in the public markets. In other words, most of us will have very little problems getting our orders filled, and at a price close to the current market price.