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. The Bullish and Bearish reading on a stock’s page, the Trending lists and the chat in a ticker room summarise what members said or did; none of them is a signal about price. 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.

New accounts. A throwaway account is the cheapest way to pump a stock, so posts, comments, notes, calls and room messages that name one — a $SYMBOL, a ticker a note, call or discussion is filed under, the stock a room belongs to, or a #hashtag that is a ticker — open 24 hours after you join. For your first week there are small daily allowances (three stock posts, discussions, notes or calls, and ten stock comments), no links or attachments on a stock post, and a short list of phrases we refuse outright, such as a promised result or an invitation to a private group. An upheld report against you puts those allowances back for 90 days, unless your track record here is already strong; three pause stock posts for that long. Nothing is saved or held when one of these refuses a post — you are told which rule applied and nothing waits in a queue — so section 4 stands as written. Verified accounts, the operator and labelled bots are not subject to them. The numbers are today’s defaults and may change; the sentence you are shown when something is refused is the rule in force.

4. Reporting, blocking and moderation

Every post, note, comment, shared resource, group message, room 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.

4a. Ticker rooms

Every stock page has a live chat room. It is public: anyone can read it, and you must have an account, and join the room, to post. A message there is your own opinion, not investment advice, and it is held to the same rules as a post: everything said in a room is about that stock, so the rules in section 3 for naming one apply to every message. Rooms add three limits of their own: a new account can read a room but waits until it is a day old before its first message, and cannot post links until it is a week old, messages are short (a thousand characters, twelve lines) and rate-limited, and the same message cannot be sent twice in a minute.

Room messages are deleted automatically thirty days after they are written, and sooner if you or a moderator delete them. A moderator can pause a room, remove a message, or ban an account from one room. A room ban stops that account posting there; it is not announced in the room, persists if you leave and come back, and does not hide or delete what the account already wrote — only a removal does that, and a removal is permanent and recorded as section 4 describes. Chat in a room is not shown in the feed or on profiles, and does not count towards reputation, trending or sentiment.

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.

A prediction you file with a note or a call — a direction, a target and a deadline — is fixed in the same way. Its terms cannot be edited once it is filed, deleting the note or closing the call does not withdraw it, and the price record settles it at its deadline, or sooner if the price reaches the target.

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.