SSK does the work and should be allowed to set any set of rules he feels is worth his effort to manage.
I am not a big fan of the gamesmanship, not that it matters much to me when I am usually lurking in the bottom quartile and not contending for much of anything. I don't know whether that makes my opinion irrelevant, unbiased, or both.
I think you could solve a lot of problems if all buys were at the ASK, not the last trade price, and all portfolios (and all securities sold) were valued at the BID price of each security. That actually tracks to what the real-life experience is.
The problem with this, of course, is that the b/a figures are worthless after the close, as MMs just walk away and set things on autopilot. I guess it would be possible to go in and find what the bid and ask were 5 minutes before the close on each security involved in a PSL trade each day, but that sounds like a lot of work to me.
I wonder if this work could be done "forensically" -- i.e after the fact and only for those trades that mattered in the final standings. In other words, capture the b/a history for stocks involved in trades, then only at the end of the contest go back and apply "real b/a rules" to all trades made by the winner. If that puts them in second place, then do the same for the new leader, etc. until we have a winner whose trades stand up to a reality check. That way we (SSK) would not waste time micro-analyzing trades that did not matter in the end, but there would be a more "legit" winner.
Or maybe just do the digging and associated adjustments if someone in the top 10 requests an "audit" of a trade done by someone else in the top 10? Or make it like the NFL - you get a "challenge" re someone else's trade, but it costs you one of your trades if the adjusted price is less than 10% different than the original trade price.
I find it very easy to put the ANAL in this ANALysis is SSK is doing all the work! :)
Still sounds like too much work to me, but SSK has a higher pain threshold than I do.
