Congratulations to all the March Top Ten, including Helmut Schwarzin who posted a healthy 81% monthly gain.   Don't forget, if you have an idea for a new prediction you think the rest of the community would enjoy betting on, send us a Suggestion today!

Edward Beckham has won the top spot for the second time in the last three months! 

Edward's incredible 355% gain for the month of February is impressive indeed - congrats, Edward!  Cheers to all of the new top-ten players as well as some familiar names and faces.  And thanks for all who help to make the Prediction Market the engaging forum and tool it has become.

Why not invite your friends and colleagues to compete against you this time?  

Decmber 2008's top % gainer was Edward Beckham, posting a respectable 61% monthly gain to his overall score (87% monthly gain in net worth).

Congratulations, Edward!

November 2008's top % gainer was Brendan Davis slotting a respectable 63% monthly gain. Props to David Kuan for pulling into second place with his hefty networth.

Congrats, Brendan!

For the last 6 weeks, you've probably noticed a serious lack in responsiveness to the Prediction Market's prize program.  Behind the scenes, we had some unexpected bug issues that have delayed the awarding of prizes to players of the Prediction Market in a serious way.  This bug was serious enough to require extensive work to simply get accurate reports for November (and October).

The good news is, the bug has been repaired, so December will bring the awards back to a normal release schedule.  The bad news is, we won't get November finalized until the end of this week.  Even though the bug has been repaired, our previous database numbers are having to be recreated for the month of November, and it's having to be done manually.  

During all of this chaos these last six weeks, I've come to ask myself (probably out of frustration, but it's worth asking), "Do people care about the prizes?"

I know for a fact everyone cares about the ranking, and their performance.  I check mine daily, and I use my networth at the top of the page to quickly guage if any of my predictions have swung wildly overnight.

But, some of our montly winners have confided to me that they didn't even know there was a prize program. 

We've enlisted some serious firepower to make the gaming aspects of the prediction market our next major push in early 2009. Some time between March and May (we're finalizing the calendar now) we'll be rolling out a series of pure-gaming updates that we believe will make the markets a total blast to play, and increase engagement several fold.  I'm not going to go into details here right now, but rest assured, I can't wait until we can get these new pieces in place.

But, I digress... I ask you, for those that care to read this: Do you really play for prizes?  Did you start playing only because of them?  Would you even notice if they disappeared?

Just curious. . .

(photo credit: CBS Interactive)

October's prize winner for having the top % gain month/month is Tom Holowka with a healthy 201% monthly gain (off of one massive bet).  Some of the leaderboard regulars have crept into the mix again, too, which is nice to see.  Below is a breakdown of the top ten performers for the month.  

Congrats Tom!  Check back soon for the November totals. We'll be updating the other relevant prize pages to record this win shortly.

Apologies to all who have been dialing in to find out who won October, and who won November.

The winner for October was incredibly difficult to contact - something we've never experienced before.  Usually, players are eager to send over the required paperwork so we can ship things off in a timely manner. 

This time around, however, we had an excrutianingly difficult time communicating with some of the players, which slowed the entire process down to a gringing halt.

The winners of the last two months will be posted here in the next 24 hours.

Thanks for your patience.

Last night we rolled out charts for the predictions.  The charts show the price history, or the community consensus, across a horizontal timescale.  The graphs default to the monthly view, but may be rebuilt using different time ranges.  If you run your mouse across the blue line in the chart, you'll see the price reflected for that time period.

There is a known bug in Firefox 3 on Macs (only) that causes the chart to display incorrectly when it first loads.  Upon refresh, the chart repairs itself.  After much research, it appears to be a defect found in the Flash plugin for FF3/Mac users.  There is no known fix that we're aware of, so hopefully a future Flash update will rectify the issue.

September's prize winner for having the top % gain month/month is Chris Sternal-Johnson.  Below is a breakdown of the top ten performers for the month.

Congratulations, Chris!  We hope you enjoy your Dash Express GPS Navigator.  You'll be eligible to win another prize in three months.

While we prep the site for a major site update tonight, let me tell you all ahead of time that October's prize will the sweet Logitech Squeezebox Boom.  Here's a review.

Today we rolled out a new E-mail alert so that when a prediction is judged on the site, players that had open bets with the prediction that was judged will be notified. 

For example, let's say I had bet S$10,000 on the Dow Jones Index prediction.   Then, something occurred in the market that triggered an early judgment, but I was away from the site that day.  I would then receive an E-mail within a ten minute timeframe of the judgment letting me know that the prediction had been decided.  If I'm curious as to how I performed, I can go to the site to learn the results by clicking a handy link in the E-mail.

If, for some reason, I didn't want this type of E-mail alert, I could always go to my notifications screen and disable the service.  We plan on making a mobile version of the same alert in the very near future.