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| The Official Rules |
• Article 1: Introduction
• Article 2: Eligibility
& Registration
• Article 3: Playing the Game
• Article 4: Earning X$
• Article 5: Spending X$
• Article 6: Weekly Performance
Contest
• Article 7: Administrators
• Article 8: Cheating, Misbehavior, and Penalties
• Article 9: Terms of Service
• Trial Rule: Gifting
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Article 1: Introduction
- NewsFutures, LLLP ("NF"), EIN: 52-226-3304, established at 36 South Charles Street, 18th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21201, USA, organizes an online promotion ("the Promotion") by means of a forecasting game ("the Game") on its site http://us.newsfutures.com ("the Site") and other partner sites.
- The Promotion provides participants to the Game opportunities to collect points ("eXchange dollars", or "X$") that may be allocated towards auctions held regularly on the Site.
- The Promotion will continue on an ongoing basis until terminated by NF. NF reserves the right to terminate the Promotion at any time without prior notice. NF also serves the right to modify the terms of the Promotion and/or the rules of the Game at any time without prior notice. NF will publish the changes that takes place in appropriate places on its site, including in this document. By continuing to participate in the Promotion after we post any such changes, you accept the updated terms and rules.
- The Promotion is organized in two phases. In the first phase, the "game" phase, participants may earn X$ depending on their performance at the Game. Each player is given some X$ to start with and must invest them in winning outcomes in order to earn more. The X$ earned may be reinvested in the Game repeatedly. Aside from X$, nothing else can be won in the game phase.
- In the second phase, the "auction phase", participants may use the X$ they earned in the first phase to bid for prizes put up at regularly held auctions. The highest bidder gets the prize in exchange for the X$ that were bid. The X$ allocated to losing bids may be reinvested in the Game (phase one) or used towards other bids during other auctions.
- Starting sunday January 26th 2003, the Promotion also offers a weekly performance contest to reward the player who generated the largest percentage increase in his/her X$ Net Worth from one sunday to another.
Article 2 : Eligibility & Registration
- No purchase is necessary. The promotion is open solely to legal residents of the United States and Canada (except Puerto Rico, and the Province of Quebec) who are 18 years of age or older. Children aged 13-17, persons residing outside of the United States or English-speaking Canada, and persons residing in areas where this Promotion is void (including Puerto Rico, and the Province of Quebec) may play the Game for recreation, but may not participate in auctions for prizes. Employees of NF, its affiliates, and partner sites are not eligible to obtain prizes. THE PROMOTION IS VOID WHERE PROHIBITED OR RESTRICTED BY LAW. Any participant found or suspected to have taken part in any of the cheating or negative behaviors specified in Article 7 will forfeit any claim to prizes.
- To register, one must fill out the registration form, and provide true, accurate, current, and complete information. To learn how this information will be protected, please take a look at our Privacy Policy.
- Registration implies full and complete acceptance of the rules and terms specified in this document.
- Each person may register only once. Registering more than once will result in your disqualification. By registering, you agree not to allow any other person to use or access your account for any purpose.
- Any player who's registration has been revoked and account suspended or destroyed by NF, for any reason, may not register again without explicit prior permission from NF. Such requests may be addressed to support@newsfutures.com.
Article 3 : Playing The Game
- The Game consists of set of speculative markets in which players buy and sell contracts associated to outcomes on future real-world outcomes (e.g., sports games, elections, etc.). To invest in an outcome, players buy the associated contract. To divest from an outcome, players sell the associated contract.
- Contracts are valued between X$0 and X$100. While the outcome is undecided, supply and demand from the players determines the trading price (including the initial trading price) of each contract. But the ultimate final value of each contract depends on NF's determination of the actual outcome of the event concerned. For example, while a Miami vs Orlando football game is going on, the trading price of the "Miami will win" contract may vary. But once the game is over, those contracts may be cashed in for X$100 each if Miami has won, or nothing if Miami has lost. The trading pages for each market clearly display the criteria that will be used to set the ultimate final value of the contracts involved, depending on NF's determination of real-world outcomes.
- Contracts come in opposite pairs, associated to opposite outcomes. For example, to each contract "Miami will win" corresponds a contract "Orlando will win" (or, equivalently, "Miami will lose"). The values of opposite contracts are linked. When one trades for P, the other trades for 100-P. Together, two opposite contracts are always worth exactly X$100.
- To buy or sell contracts, players place "orders" on the market, specifying the number of contracts involved, and the preferred buying or selling price. For example: "Buy 10 contracts of 'Miami will win' at X$75 each".
- The best priced buy and sell orders are always available for all players to see, so they can aim their orders to buy or sell at other players's standing orders to sell or buy.
- For a transaction to actually happen, a player's order must match at least one order from another player. An order to buy contracts at price P will match any order to sell those contracts at price P or any order to buy opposite contracts at price 100-P. For example: an order to "buy 'Miami will win' at 75" will match an order to "sell 'Miami will win' at 75", but it will also match an order to "buy 'Miami will lose' at 25' (the two are logically and practically equivalent).
- An order that finds no match in the existing standing orders will itself be added to the list of publicly displayed standing orders, awaiting a match.
- Standing orders may be left standing indefinitely, until trading is actually halted, or they may be cancelled at any time by their owners.
- An order that finds a match may be partially or completely fulfilled. If the match or set of matches covers all the contracts specified in the order, then the order will be completely fulfilled. Otherwise, the unfulfilled part of the order will be sent back to the market as a standing order.
- Each market will go through 3 states: Open for trading (active), Trading halted, and Closed, in that order.
- While trading is open, orders to buy or sell may be submitted at any time. (Although NF shall not be held responsible for any technical or software failures that may prevent, slow or alter trading in any way, and for any length of time.)
- Once trading is halted, all standing orders are cancelled, and no new orders can be submitted.
- Finally, once NF's staff has determined the prevailing outcome, the market is closed and the corresponding contracts in player's portfolios are cashed in for X$ at a rate specified in advance for each possible outcome. For example, if Miami has won against Orlando, each "Miami will win" contract is cashed in for X$100, while "Orlando will win" contracts are cashed in for naught.
- NF is the sole rightfull judge of the appropriate time to halt and/or close markets. Its decisions as to which outcome actually prevailed in the real-world, and thus at which rate to cash in the contracts, is in its sole discretion, final, and without appeal.
- GAME OF SKILL. Although chance can never be entirely ruled out as a factor in human affairs and the determination of any real-world outcome, be it a sports competition, an unemployment rate, a box-office result, or a peace negociation, this speculation game is overwhelmingly based on skill, knowledge, and reasoning. For several reasons:
- Players can choose the individual markets and topics on which to speculate. They are under no obligation to participate in any market in which their knowledge of the facts, or domain expertise is lacking. They can focus their speculation on those topics and markets where their expertise and knowledge of the facts reduces the element of chance to a minimum.
- The game is played over the long term, and involves many varied topics and markets, so even if an element of chance may be present at the level of individual topics and markets, on the whole it is statistically reduced to nil as far as knowledgeable and motivated players are concerned.
- Because this is a speculation game where players can buy and sell in real time to each other up to the point where the outcome is known, and sometimes beyond that point, in contrast to a betting game which does not allow one to retract his or her bet once it is placed, players exert a real and continuous measure of control over their investment strategies. Even if chance may affect outcomes in the real-world, it is primarily skill in anticipating the behavior of other players, and hunting for timely information about developments in the real-world that allows one to "buy low and sell high" in order to profit at the game. A typical case is one where a player learns of a real-world outcome before others, and profits from that advance knowledge with absolutely no risk whatsoever.
- Prizes are given away at regularly scheduled auctions to those that make the highest bids with the X$ that they have earned in the speculative game. Winning an auction itself involves strategy with respect to other competing bidders. So not only is there a truly objective criterion for determining the winners (the highest bid), but it is also the case that one does not have to be the wealthiest player in order to win a prize.
Article 4 : Earning X$
- The Game's play money is called the "X$", or "eXchange dollar". These are akin to points that have no counterpart or intrinsic value in the real-world. They can only be used to participate in the Game or to bid in the Promotion's auctions.
- X$ cannot be "bought". NF gives several thousand X$ to every participant when his/her account is first created.
- If a participant has lost his/her X$ and needs more to continue playing the Game, he/she may visit the Free X$ area where a variable set of options may be available to refill his/her account with more X$. Only one such "refill" is allowed daily to participants whose account net worth is less than X$19,000.
Article 5 : Spending X$
- X$ can exclusively be used to participate in auctions for prizes in the Winners' Store. Participants may only bid the uninvested X$ they have earned in excess of their first X$20,000.
- Although each auction has a preset "closing time" beyond which no more bids may be accepted, this closing time is pushed back five minutes later than the latest bid whenever that bid is made within five minutes of the closing time. For example, if the closing time is 6:00 PM, and a bid is made at 5:58 PM, then the new closing time is 6:03 PM.
- In each auction, the highest bidder gets the prize in exchange for the X$ that he/she bid.
- A participant who makes a winning bid will have his/her account debited of the corresponding amount of X$. Even if he/she forfeits the prize, his/her account will still be debited of the amount of the winning bid. In contrast, the X$ allocated to losing bids are not debited and may be reinvested in the Game, or used to make other bids during other auctions.
- If an auction closes and no bids have been made, then the prize may not be awarded at all, or it may be put up for auction again at a later time.
- On a given month, each player may bid on no more than a single prize. If a player ends up being the highest bidder on two or more prizes on a given month, then, as a penalty, his account will be debited the total amount of all his bids but he will not be awarded any of the prizes. Instead the prizes will be put up for auction again the next month.
- The prizes put up for auction are reserved for residents of the United States and Canada only (with the exception of Puerto Rico and the province of Quebec) as documented by the physical address specified in the user's profile at the time of registration to the Game. The prize will be shipped to the address he/she specified at the time of registration and verifable in his/her "member profile". Prizes will be awarded within approximately eight weeks of an auction's closing. If a player wants to have the prize shipped to another address than the one he/she specified upon registering, he/she will have to provide NF proof that the original address was indeed his/hers at the date of registration.
- The selection and starting prices (in X$) of the prizes put up for auction depends on availability and NF reserves the right to substitute prizes of equal or greater value for any specific auction at any time. If a prize substitution is made for a specific auction prior to its closing time, the substitution will be effectively posted on the auction's bid page.
- For a hard copy of the list of auction winners, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope to NewsFutures, LLLP, 49 Poplar Point Road, Edgewater, MD 21037, USA. Only registered users eligible to participate fully in the Promotion may request a list of auction winners.
Article 6 : Weekly Performance
Contest
- The weekly performance contest is cancelled until further notice.
Article 7 : Administrators
- NewsFutures administrators are distinguished from normal Game players by having their user names shown as bold red wherever they are displayed on the website.
- Administrators may play the Game for competitive fun, but are not eligible to participate in auctions or to win prizes.
- Because administrators who play the Game are not eligible to win prizes, their X$ wealth cannot be reduced by bidding for prizes. In order to keep their X$ wealth in appropriate proportion to normal Game players', thus preserving the competition's fun, all administrators shall be subject to the following reduction of their X$ wealth after each auction period:
Let T1 be the top X$ wealth value (cash plus holdings) of all regular
players as shown in the Top-Traders list on the day after the auction.
(Auction bids will not yet have been removed from totals in this list.) Let
T2 be the largest of these same regular-player values after auction bids
have been taken into account - i.e. subtracted from the auction winners.
(Note that T1 and T2 may belong to two different regular players if a lead
change has occurred due to winning auction bids.) If A is an
administrator's wealth as shown in the Top-Traders list (or any club list if
the administrator is not among the top 100 players), then the X$ reduction R
for that administrator is calculated as: R = A * min(A/T1, 1) * (1 - T2/T1)
- The X$ reduction shall be effected by a reduction in available cash of the administrators. If there is not enough available cash to implement the reduction initially, additional cash shall be removed from the accounts after the sale of holdings makes additional cash available.
Article 8 : Cheating, Misbehavior, and Penalties
- NF reserves the right to penalize, suspend, disable, and/or destroy the account of any user that it merely suspects has engaged in any negative or cheating behavior, including:
- Registering more than once, creating and/or managing more than one account.
- Providing incomplete, not-current, false, or inaccurate data in the registration form.
- Engaging, or planning or threatening to engage in any activity which may result in restricting or inhibiting any other user from using and enjoying the Game, including, but not restricted to boycotts, law suits, and computer attacks.
- Using software robots, scripts, or any other automated system to play the Game or participate in auctions. Members are similarly restricted from playing the Game or participating in auctions with more than one type, version or copy of a browsing software application at any one time.
- Engaging in any kind of transaction meant primarily to transfer X$ from one account to another. (Except as provided for in the section below titled "Gifts".)
- Engaging in any kind of purposefully losing behavior.
- Using the communications facilities provided by the Promotion (including, but not limited to private mail, message boards, clubs, personal presentation page) to spread unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane or indecent information of any kind, or any message negatively inclined in any way towards NF, its sponsors partners, their staff, administrators or the Promotion itself.
- Posting a message whose topic is not within the explicit scope of the particular message board to which it is posted.
- Using the communications facilities provided by the Promotion (including, but not limited to private mail, message boards, clubs, personal presentation page) to transmit or in any way exploit any information, software or other material for commercial purposes, or which contains advertising.
- Using the mail facility provided by the Promotion to send unsollicited mass mail to other players.
- Failing to login for at least 30 consecutive days.
- In any of those suspected or actual cases, the nature and timing of the penalty will be entirely NF's choice and its alone, and may be applied without prior warning.
- In any of those suspected or actual cases, the user forfeits any claim to redeem any of the Promotion's prizes.
TEMPORARY RULE ON GIFTS: In an experiment to test the feasibility of allowing gifts, until May 26, 2003, a manual process to implement funds transfers will be conducted by cujo as follows:
- Having received a confirming message from both the benefactor and the recipient, the following considerations will be applied:
- Recipients will be limited to receiving a total of X$5000 per day (X$1000 increments only).
- The benefactor will be charged an additional 20% tax for the transaction and must end up with more funds than the recipient.
- After the donation, the recipient must still qualify for Free X$ (see Article 4).
- Finally, the recipient is ineligible for prizes for two weeks following receiving a gift.
This experiment may be concluded before the specified end date if the volume is overwhelming, or for any other reason. And response may not be immediate.
Article 9 : Terms of Service
- By participating in the Promotion or merely visiting any NewsFutures.com website, you agree to the Terms of Service.
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