Published: 13 Jun, 2007 11:07 PT

I know some members as wondering why the blog had not been updated as frequently as it had been before. Some were wondering if I was out on vacation. Well, I wish. We've been working on some truly awesome new features for the last two months, and I'm truly excited to announce that the new features have just been launched last night! In addition to some major bug fixes that are meant to make the site even more stable, we've also added some convenience features to make the trading and navigation experience simpler and more intuitive to our users. I wanted to thank you, our members, for your patience with the bugs in the system, and your feedback that helped us fixed these bugs. But on top of all these incremental improvements, the real crown jewel of this update is the introduction of what could be the world's first Interactive Virtual hedge Fund Simulator. This allows our members to convert their own Tipping Monkey virtual portfolios into Virtual Hedge Funds, and try their hand at being a Virtual Hedge Fund Manager. A Virtual Hedge Fund is meant to mimic a real Hedge Fund in terms of features and yet, provides the trading liquidity like a mutual fund. When a portoflio is converted into a Virtual Hedge Fund (VHF), the owner will have to specify a name and Ticker Symbol for the VHF, set up some fund parameters and the Initial Share Price, and write a pitch to attract other members to invest in your VHF. So the real killer for VHFs is that the Ticker Symbol for the VHF actually works in the Tipping Monkey quotation system! You can type in a VHF Ticker Symbol in the "Get Quotes" box and a quote for the VHF will show up, just like any other sotck or fund symbol. To answer a popular request from our members that we should have charts for portoflios, we've gone one step futher. In the near future, you will be able chart your VHF in the quotes page - how cool is that? Now with a symbol and a quotation system, trading is possible. That's right, once you create a VHF, you immediately open up your VHF for other members to invest! We've expanded our Virtual Trading system to allow you to buy and sell shares of VHFs as part of your trading strategy. This allows you to invest in your favorite member portfolio and get a cut of the profits that this other member makes. You can also create a VHF that is a Fund-of-Virtual-Hedge-Funds if you wish. Or, you can build your own baskets of Stocks, ETFs, Mutual Funds and VHFs. The possibilities are really endless! Now you may then ask: "what's in it for the Virtual Hedge Fund Manager? The manager seems to be doing all the work and other members are just riding on the coat tails and reaping profits!" Good point. For starters, being a VHF Manager helps you experience the additional responsibilities of managing other members' assets (virtual assets, to be precise). This is useful since some people trade differently when the money is not real, so when some of the assets are not their own, we might help them think harder before they enter into a trade. I think this is an important aspect that most other paper-trading sites do not address. Secondly, just like a real Hedge Fund, VHFs also assess management and incentive fees. And just like a real Hedge Fund, VHF fees will be debited from the VHF assets, and credited to the VHF Manager. It follows that as more members invest in your VHF (i.e. by buying shares of it), you increase your deployable asset base and have more money to invest. In turn, this will translate to more fees credited to your name. This makes the simulation closer to reality where you have to manage investor acquisition, fund performance, and expectations. Moreover, Tipping Monkey actually tracks your career earnings as a VHF Manager, thus allowing one to compare a particular VHF Manager to another. Talking about competition here. And while we are on the note of competition, we also created new King-of-the-Hill ranking categories for VHFs, such as "Top performing VHF" and "Most popular VHF based on number of investors". That should be good for starters, but stay tuned, there will be more categories. Last, but certainly not least, we've created additional supporting pages to let you browse VHF Manager profiles, and special quotation pages for VHFs that tell you a bit about the VHF, current members that have invested in it, and links to VHF details and Manager profile. We are truly excited about this key milestone that will certainly set Tipping Monkey apart from the rest of the financial simulation and social networking sites. And guess what? This is just the beginning. We have plans that are much bigger than this. Try it out, tell your friends if you like it, and most importantly, don't touch that dial! If you are not familiar with Hedge Funds, we wrote a brief overview of this mysterious entity aimed at the regular investor. Click here to read our introduction to Hedge Funds. Happy Trading, but always INVESTIGATE before you INVEST.