Celebdaq - The addiction

Currently I am addicted to Celebdaq the BBC celebrity share trading game. There once was an accompanying TV programme on BBC3, but that has been taken off air.

The game is free to sign up to and the idea is that you are given £10,000 to 'buy' shares in celebs which include pop stars, film stars, royals and reality TV contestants, but no politicians (apart from Arnold Schwarzenegger for some reason). The value of your portfolio can rise according to who else is buying that celeb. You receive dividends on a Friday morning which are calculated through the amount of column inches your celeb has generated over the last week, depending on how long you have held the shares for. To simplify it somewhat, to make money you can either trade on the highest mover (whose price is rising the most, percentage wise) or buy one person at the beginning of the trading week and stick with them in the hope that they generated a lot of column inches in the newspapers. The amount you receive is weighted depending on the publication that it was in, and only selected papers and magazines count. Coverage in Broadsheets papers, like the Telegraph etc give you better returns than coverage in regular newspapers of tabloids or gossip magazines. Most Celebdaqers would use a game plan that was a combination of the two, depending on their aims. Some play to become top of the leader board, so need the highest percentage gain, some play for 'icons' i.e monetary value. To prevent their being a monopoly in certain shares, players are 'knee-capped' on the Monday after you receive £1 million. A bit of crafty trading as you approach the £1 million mark can lead to you making £2-3 million ny 6am Monday (the cut off point). for every £1 Million you achieve you get an icon related to the total amount of money you have in that portfolio, for example, you get a yacht for £10 milion, a sports car for £5 million.

I tend to trade for icons/money which I find the most fun. There is a Movers & Losers board that shows you five (and more) of the highest moving celebs, percentage wise, which changes approximately every 15 minutes, but I also like to guess who is going to achieve the highest dividend at the end of the week. One tool to help predict this is the p.d or Potential Dividend which is posted most afternoons and is an estimate of what didvidend that share would garner if it was held for the full seven days. This can also aid in deciding whether to change your share and take 3 or 4 days worth of a good yielding share rather than a full weeks worth of a dud share.

Althoughh this may sound a bit complicated, you soon end up checking your shares two or three times a day if you can, and regularly refreshing the Movers & Losers board page. There are several Message Boards on the site that can be informative for hints and tips, plus there is usually some fun and irrelvant discussion going on too. Add to this, the mini-leagues which are run by some traders as a sperate mini-competition. Some are huge, with weekly relegations and promotions, some are themed (I am currently in a Big Brother contestants only league - which I am topping!). There is also the MotDaq league, which is a team competition based on football. Each week a your team plays a different 'footbal team' and you score goals depending on how much your percentage increase is higher than one of you opponents.

All in all, this means that whenever I am on the web, even if just for ten minutes, I will usually have a Celebdaq window open. I think I need to go into re-hab!