Terms of Use

These terms cover Market Close, a public investing-reputation platform. By creating an account or using the site you agree to them. They are written to be read, not to be survived; where something matters it is stated plainly rather than buried.

1. Not investment advice

Nothing on Market Close is investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Portfolios here are simulated. Every account is funded with $100,000,000 of play capital; no real money is ever invested, held, transferred or managed by us, and no order is ever routed to a market. Calls, notes, posts, reputation scores and leaderboard positions are members’ own opinions and their own recorded results. Past results — simulated ones especially — do not predict future results. We are not a broker, not an investment adviser, and not registered with any financial regulator. Get advice from someone licensed to give it before you risk real money.

2. Your account

• You must be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and you must not be barred from using the service under applicable law.
• Sign-in is delegated to Google or GitHub. Keep that account secure — anyone who controls it controls yours.
• One human, one account. Automated accounts are allowed only with our agreement and are labelled as bots wherever they post.
• You are responsible for everything published from your account.

3. What you post

You keep ownership of what you write. By posting it you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, display and distribute it on the platform so the service can work — including showing it in feeds, on profiles, in search results and in link previews. That licence ends for new distribution when you delete the content, subject to the record-keeping described in section 5.

Do not post:

• Anything unlawful, or anything that infringes someone else’s rights.
• Harassment, threats, or targeted abuse of another member.
• Market manipulation. No pump-and-dump. If you hold a position in something you are writing about, say so. Paid promotion presented as independent research is a suspension-level breach, not a warning-level one.
• Impersonation — of a person, a firm, or another member’s track record.
• Spam, scraped content passed off as your own, or automated posting at volume.
• Material that is presented as fact and is false, where it could move a market or mislead a reader about a real security.

4. Reporting, blocking and moderation

Every post, note, comment, shared resource, group message and profile has a report control. Reports go to a human review queue and are resolved with a written note; a report about content you cannot see — a direct message you are not part of, a group you are not in — is not accepted, so reporting cannot be used to make a moderator read something private.

You can block any account from its profile. A block works in both directions: neither of you appears in the other’s feed, search results, suggestions, mention autocomplete or message list, and neither can start a new conversation with the other. Existing message history is left intact and becomes visible again if you unblock.

Where a report is upheld we may remove the content. Removal is permanent — there is no hidden state to restore it from — and the decision and its reason are kept on the report.

5. Your track record

This is the unusual clause, and it is the one the whole product rests on: trades and closed calls are immutable. Once written they cannot be edited or deleted — not by you, not through the app, and not at the database, which enforces it with triggers. Posts and comments can be edited for 24 hours and deleted at any time; notes can be edited and deleted freely. Trades cannot, because someone else’s leaderboard position and reputation grade are computed against yours, and rewriting history after the outcome is known would make every number on the site meaningless.

Deleting your account therefore anonymises it rather than erasing it. Your name, handle, avatar, banner, bio, location and contact details are wiped, your portfolios are made private, and what remains is an unattributed shell holding the trade records other people’s statistics depend on. If that is not acceptable to you, do not book trades here.

6. Availability and data

The service is provided as-is. Market data, fundamentals, filings and calendar dates come from third parties (including Yahoo Finance and the SEC’s EDGAR system); it may be delayed, incomplete or wrong, and we do not warrant it. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the platform. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for losses arising from your use of the site or your reliance on anything published on it.

7. Ending it

You can stop using Market Close at any time and delete your account from Settings, subject to section 5. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, particularly for manipulation, impersonation or sustained harassment.

8. Changes

We will update the date at the top of this page when these terms change. Continuing to use the platform after a change means you accept the new version.

Questions about these terms, or about a moderation decision, can go to the operator through the report control or by direct message.