Virtual investment website UpDown closing in July

UpDown, a financial social media website operating in the U.S. that provides users with a virtual investment platform is closing its doors next month. The decision comes after a lot of deliberation about what the company believes is the future of the industry and what users are telling them.

“We are sorry to inform you that after many years of helping traders improve their investment strategies we will be closing updown.com,” the company said in an email to users. “We have decided that in order to be able to provide you with a better service, we want to focus all of our resources and efforts into building the best global platform for investors from all around the world: sharewise.com.”

Updown will be closing down on July 31. Its service will be transferred to Sharewise.

UpDown was a full-fledged trading simulation with a virtual portfolio function that allowed investors to test and improve their skills through collaboration, competition and aggregated wisdom.

“Global markets are now more intertwined than ever before, what happens on the other side of the world will have an influence on your investments and outcomes,” UpDown officials said in their email. “Therefore it is now more important than ever to be able to have access to the insights of investors in their own local markets. If you want to know what is going on in the Chinese markets, you should just be able to see what Chinese investors are talking about and which stocks or subjects they consider important at a specific moment.

“This is precisely our goal in building and expanding sharewise.com, a global platform where investors from the USA can connect with Chinese, Korean, German, French, British or Indonesian investors (and we are constantly working on making this list longer). We are certain that the change will have a positive impact on our users in the long run.”