Stock Market Today: April 30th - May 4th, 2018

sorry you guys! i kind of lost motivation running those contests. really hate to put it so blunt like that but i'm just totally being honest here.

unfortunately the user participation this year has been rather putrid...it started off okay at the start of the year but has been on a steady decline south since...we never quite got up to last year's levels on participation which was my hope at the beginning of the year. i'm really not sure why.

i can't really put a finger on it because it doesn't seem to be a "contest" related thing per say, but rather a forum issue. seems to me like the forums have really lost a lot of participation as a whole, not just on the competitions. what i mean by that is, it appears traffic & posts on the forums has slowed down to a crawl lately. i believe @Frankenstein was the first to point this out a couple of times on these threads in the past as well. i think he's absolutely spot on IMHO.

for me it's rather difficult to stay motivated about running something when participation is as pathetic as it has been here of late.

truth be told, my primarly objective with running those competitions from DAY #1 was to keep members engaged at the forums here and coming back regularly. i hope i was at least able to accomplish this somewhat over the years.

i've been at this community for about 12 years now (pretty sure i'm the longest standing member left from the old HSM era aside from Gil), and i've honestly never seen the situation as far as traffic and user participation as horrendous as it is today.

i've been running those competitions for about 5 years since taking over Mark Vierra in 2013, and admittedly it does kind of suck to have to essentially shut that down due to the lack of interest/participation.

i don't want to go off on a full blown rant here and take things off-topic in this thread (i guess i kinda did already though.) my apologies to the rest of you who have to sit and read this...

i'll just leave at this--it was a great run running the competitions here while it lasted. i really enjoyed running them as much as some of you guys enjoyed taking part in them (seriously). i really wish the participation was a lot better than it was. truthfully, i'm sometimes left scratching my head wondering why those never really took off this year.

i'm honestly completely out of ideas on how we can bring in more people into this community. i think the issue here is that we just don't have the user growth that we should be having here.

i think if we had more people posting on the forums and exchanging thoughts and ideas it might help bring them over to the competitions as well.

have been saying this for years now, but w/o much results sadly...albeit we have seen a little bump in new members joining of late...but it hasn't really been nearly enough to make a significant difference unfortunately.

anyway, i may be going off the grid here soon. those pesky family issues have popped up for me again. truth is i haven't really been following the market action much at all this week.

hope you guys are all having a great trading week thus far and sorry for going off on this little tangent in here.

really appreciate everyone's contributions to these threads, as well as the few participants who stuck it out at the end on the competitions as well. you guys are seriously the greatest.