Your portfolio is the nerve centre of your trading operation. It's where you buy and sell shares. Here you can see what shares you own, how much they cost you, and how much they're worth now. You can also check how much cash you have left to spend, how much you're worth including the value of your shares, and how much money you've made (or lost!) since last week.

In the top right hand corner there is the cornerstone of every celebdaq investor's life: The TRADING TOOL. This allows you to buy and sell shares in any of the listed celebrities direct from your portfolio. There is also a VIEW PROFILE button which allows you to look at more detailed information about the celebrity. First, a guide to what you can do with the trading tool.

The BUY and SELL buttons give you the option of choosing how many shares you wish to purchase/sell in the celebrity. Just right for when you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. In the example above, Brad Pitt costs 1.66 per share. If you want to buy 100 shares it will cost you 167.66 (including commission).

The BUY MAX button gives you a quick way of buying all the shares you can afford in a celebrity - useful when their price is rocketing up and you need to invest your money in a hurry!

The SELL ALL button gives you a quick way of selling all the shares you own in a celebrity - useful when their price is plummeting and you need to make a quick exit!

Finding out more about individual celebs. Either Click 'View Profile' on the trading tool, or, once you own a celebrity, click on 'Trade' or their name i.e Brad Pitt to go to their investor relations section where you will find information on their trading data, a profile and a guide to relevant Celebdaq news. There is also a TRADING TOOL, which allows you to actually buy or sell shares in that celebrity from that page.

The Data section gives you an overview of the recent trading history of the celebrity so you can see how they are performing in the marketplace.

The Profile section offers biographical information on the celebrity, which can be useful if you're not entirely sure about who you are investing in, or if you just want to know a bit more about them before handing over your dosh.

You can visit other celebrities' profile pages by using the navigation lists near the top of the page.

The symbols in the CURRENT PRICE columns show how that share price has been moving over the last 24 hours. If a celeb's name is red it means the price is going down. If it's green it means it's going up.

Dividends are your reward for investing in a successful celebrity.

Dividends are paid out every Friday. In order to qualify for the full dividend, you must have owned the shares from Monday to Friday . You have to buy a celebrity by close of play Monday and keep them until Friday.

Every week the press coverage (in selected publications) of each listed celebrity is added up and weighted according to our dividend payment algorithm. The dividends are then announced and you will be paid according to the number of shares you own in each celebrity.

For instance, if the dividend on Victoria Beckham one week is calculated at 28p, and you own 5000 shares, you could earn £1400. If you own 2 shares, you would get just 56 pence.

If you bought a share just before the dividends are paid out, you would only get a fraction of the full payment.

NOTE: Not all shares will pay out a dividend every week. If a celebrity receives no press coverage at all, there will be no dividend payments.

We use selected RSS feeds from the following publications: Daily Mirror, The Sun, Daily Star, Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and their Sunday equivalents. Heatworld is also included.

The exact formula for relating dividend payments to press coverage is a trade secret. But the details below should be sufficient to give you a good idea of how much your stocks might pay out at the end of the week.

Every day selected publications are scoured for celebrity news. When an article related to a celebrity listed on Celebdaq is found, the headline and body text from the RSS feeds are checked for the number of mentions of that celebrity and then inputted into our system. A mention would constitute the celebrity's full name, nickname, first name or surname.

The dividend payment per share is based on a rate of 0.035 per mention. Once the value per share has been calculated, based on the data generated over the last seven days, the figure is then square rooted to give the final dividend paid per share (providing you've held the shares long enough to qualify for the full dividend).

However, some publications are more celeb-obsessed than others - coverage in an upmarket broadsheet is much harder to get than in a red-top, so celebs earn more for it. Whereas every D-list celebrity gets a mention in the tabloids, so this kind of publicity earns you less.

Please note: we make every effort to measure press coverage accurately, but our decision is final. We will not enter into any correspondence over disputed dividend payouts.

A full dividend list outlining which celebs have received dividends and for how much is published in the Shareholder Statements section every Friday.

There are two ways to buy shares:

1) THE AUTO PORTFOLIO - If you're not sure where to start, this is a good place. Many beginners find this the easiest way to start buying shares. This function is only available to you when you own no shares at all. The auto portfolio generates a list of celebs for you. The list will include four from the current fastest-rising shares, plus one random celeb for luck.

If you don't like the selection, you can generate another list, or cancel and try the easy way to buy shares instead...

2) THE TRADING TOOL gives you more choice than the auto portfolio. It allows you to select exactly which celebs you want to buy. It exists within Your Portfolio but also on all celebrity profile pages. It is what you use to actually buy or sell shares with.

First of all, decide whether you're going to SELL or BUY, and choose the right option from the drop-down on the left. Then decide how many shares of that particular celebrity you want and enter the number into the empty quantity box in the middle. Click the '=' button to show how much it will cost.

If you're not sure, or you want to see how much commission you're paying on the deal, click CHECK TRADE. This will give you the chance to cancel the deal or go ahead with it. To skip that and do the deal straight away, click EXECUTE TRADE

The BUY MAX button gives you a quick way of buying all the shares you can afford in a celebrity - useful when their price is rocketing up and you need to invest your money in a hurry!

The SELL ALL button gives you a quick way of selling all the shares you own in a celebrity - useful when their price is plummeting and you need to make a quick exit!

When you've successfully bought some shares you'll be taken back to your portfolio, where you'll see the new shares listed.

Prices go up and down according to two things: the straightforward demand for the celeb, because of their price history and current performance, and a secondary, more complex demand based on their potential dividend.

Demand: If demand for Kylie is high because traders can see her price is already rising - i.e. lots of people are buying lots of her shares - her share price will rise. If lots of Kylie shares are being sold, her share price will fall.

To find out about buying and selling shares, click here.

Potential Dividend: Every day we measure the coverage each celebrity got in the morning's press, and we convert this measurement into a potential dividend payment (paid out at the end of the week). If a celeb gets lots of press coverage, they will have a high dividend payment potential, and this may increase their value - i.e. their share price rises as traders buy them based on their potential dividend payment.

For more details on how dividends work, click here.

The Celebdaq stock exchange has sophisticated controls in place to ensure that players cannot buck the market by artificially inflating prices. The share price, dividend payment and level of trading in each share are constantly cross-checked by the system to warn us of any dodgy deals being stitched up in a boiler room somewhere...

The trading week starts on Friday morning and finishes at midnight on Thursday. Every day there's money to be made on the 'daq but to make your trading life easier and more lucrative, here are a few things you should know about the Celebdaq trading week:

MONDAYS
Millionaire Day - It's Millionaire Day, otherwise known as kneecapping. If you've earned more than a million, your hard-traded cash will be replaced with a prestigious status symbol and you'll be given 10,000 virtual pounds to continue trading with.

Listing and de-listing - As a result of the Trader's Choice vote, we wave goodbye to the dead wood (celebs we kick off the site) and say hello to the 'daq newcomers (new celebrities we add to the site). Keep an eye on the Statements section and votes for details of who they are.

THURSDAYS
Trading week ends at midnight.

FRIDAYS
Dividend Day - It's Dividend Day, Celebdaq's answer to Christmas, but unlike Christmas, dividends are not guaranteed. Check your portfolio to find out how many lovely dividends you've been paid on your investments, if any.

Dividend List - Find out who last week's biggest-paying shares were in the full dividend list, published in the Shareholders Statements section.

Millionaire Day is on a Monday.

What's the point of having money if you can't spend it on lavish status symbols? That's why we created a Millionaires Club complete with status symbol icons.

The Millionaires Club was formed in response to the hyperinflation in the market: Where a number of people have enormous wealth it is possible to corner the market in a particular celeb, preventing ordinary investors from owning any shares in them. In the interest of fair play, people have to have their wealth capped so that this doesn't happen.

Members of the Club will have all their shares sold at their current market value, and their vast pile of cash exchanged for envy-inducing objects of desire such as sports cars, yachts and executive jets...This is something that currently happens in the early hours of Monday mornings.

All millionaires will have their portfolios emptied and their cash moved to an offshore tax haven, courtesy of our top accountants. They will keep a flat £10k float to carry on trading with, and a shiny new icon will be added to their names on the charts and on their portfolio page. We make it a flat figure, regardless of exact totals, to ensure that Millionaires can't use any residual wealth to gain an unfair advantage over new traders. Here's how it'll work:

• £1m: fat wad of cash
• £5m: sexy car
• £10m: luxury yacht
• £25m: very big house in the country
• £50m: executive jet
• £100m: exotic island
• £500m: crown of a minor nation state
• More than £1bn: you become Bill Gates

So when you make your first million, you get a wad of cash icon. When you make your next million, you have two wads. When you reach your 5th million, you get a sexy car. The 6th gets you a car and a wad; 25th is your country pile; 71st a jet, two yachts and a wad, etc.

Every week on the Celebdaq homepage we run a Traders’ Choice vote to give you, the shareholders, the opportunity to have your say on who gets to join the hallowed halls of ‘daq Towers and who should be given their bus fare home and told to pack their bags.

The Traders’ Choice vote runs from 8.30pm on Friday to 8pm the following Friday, with the results actioned on the following Monday at midday (on Bank Holidays, results will be actioned on the next working day).

The results of the vote (i.e. which new celebs are being added to the site and which are being removed) will be advertised via our Statements section before the resulting listing and de-listing occurs.

Traders who own shares in the de-listed celebrity at the time of de-listing will lose their investment, for this reason shareholders are advised to take a specific interest in the results of the vote throughout the trading week.

Mini-leagues are created by you, the trader, and allow you compete against your friends/colleagues/family/enemies in a fierce and deeply personal rivalry, safe from the throng of the main chart.

Click the Mini-leagues link on the left hand navigation. Or go to your portfolio. Then you will see a link saying "edit/create your own mini-leagues". Click it and you will come to the mini-leagues pages where you have three choices.

Personal Leagues
Add a new league - click on this to create your own league. Remember - no obscene or offensive names or we will delete the league. Try to think of a suitable name for your league that sums up who is competing. Leagues are limited to a maximum of 30 players.

Leagues You Own
If you click on one of the leagues you can see who is in it and edit the membership. To add someone you'll need their User ID number (they'll have to send you this themselves) - it's in their portfolio at the top of the page. You can also change the league's name by following the instructions. You are responsible for managing the members of any league you create and should not add people to your leagues without their permission.

Leagues You Are In
Here you can see all the leagues you are in, both ones you own and ones you are competing in. You can delete yourself from any league, even ones you own, if you no longer wish to compete. Just follow the instructions.

Appearing As 'Pending'
If you get kneecapped and don't log in for at least a day you are dropped from the charts (and hence appear as 'pending' in the mini-leagues). This is because you don't have any celebs so don't have anything to make it worth you appearing in the league. Once you log in you'll re-appear in the league the following day.

The League of Leagues is a chart where you can find out how well your mini league or leagues are doing in comparison to everyone else’s. You'll find a link to it from the Mini Leagues page.

All mini leagues containing at least two players will be entered into the League of Leagues and you will be able to view them in the same way as you view the Players’ Chart – everyone will be able to see the top 30, as well the leagues 15 places above and below theirs.

The chart will be calculated and ranked in order of the average percentage gain for each league (sum of all percentages divided by the number of players in the league). It will be updated on a daily basis at the same time as the main chart.

Each Friday the top 3 leagues will be awarded a gold, silver or bronze medal for first, second and third place respectively.

DAILY UPDATE EMAILS are sent to all Celebdaq players to keep you abreast of what's happening on the market. You can stop these any time you like by updating your details.

Go to your portfolio page, then click on the UPDATE PERSONAL DETAILS link underneath the list of your shares. This takes you to a page with your registration details and gameplay options.

In the CHANGE EMAIL UPDATE OPTIONS section, you can turn off the daily emails and just get a weekly update instead. If you choose to turn off all mail, you won't get the weekly update either - but this does also mean that you will not receive any email price alerts either.

For security purposes, you will need to enter your existing password when changing any details on this page.

The email updates are as follows:

Daily Update - this email is issued daily and will list the shares in your portfolio and how much they are worth.

Weekly Update - this email is issued each Friday and will list the shares in your portfolio and how much they are worth. The email also includes the week's Top 5 dividend payers and how much you earned, per share, in dividends.

Millionaire Mail - each time you earn £1 million (if you are so lucky), you will receive an email alert. This email is issued on Mondays.

Price Alerts - this facility is only available to players using the "Pro" Trader portfolio. The facility allows you to tell Celebdaq to email you when a share reaches a certain price. See "How do I set up price alerts?" for more details.

The BBC will only ever use your personal details for the purposes of administering the game and will not publish them or provide them to anyone without your permission. If you would like to know more about the BBC's privacy policy, please see Privacy Policy.

1) Make sure that your username and password are both more than 6 characters long, and that you are spelling them with the CoRRecT caPITaliSaTioN.

2) If you have other BBCi logins, like a messageboard for instance, either use the same login, or try not to switch between the two programmes - if you try to use both at the same time with different logins they will each log you out of the other, or worse still cause a grey screen of "server error" death for you.

3) Be patient when trying to trade - it can get slow at busy times, especially if you're accessing from home via an ordinary modem.

4) Check your browser settings. This site requires "cookies" to be enabled to work - these are small files which live on your computer and tell Celebdaq that you are who you say you are, and the system should allow you to spend the Celebdaq money in your account. Sometimes people set their browsers up to have cookies disabled, to stop commercial sites from targeting them with on-screen advertising. See the BBC's WebWise article on how to do this here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/questions/query191.shtml

If those suggestions don't help, We'll need more help from you as to exactly what happens - your Celebdaq user ID number, what exactly you're trying to do when it goes wrong, what error messages if any you get on the screen, etc. And as a last resort - if you trust us - you could also send your username and password so we can have a go ourselves and try to work it out.

YOUR USERNAME IS NOT THE SAME AS YOUR ALIAS. Your username is what the system identifies you by when you log in, and cannot be changed. You can, however, change your "alias", which is the name which is used throughout the site - in the charts, for instance, and on your portfolio.

You can change your alias at any time without losing any shares or cash you may have, simply by updating your details.

Go to your portfolio page, then click on the UPDATE PERSONAL DETAILS link underneath the list of your shares. This takes you to a page with your registration details and gameplay options.

Go to the CHANGE YOUR ALIAS section, and enter your new details.

For security purposes, you will need to enter your password when changing any details on this page.

To change your password or email address just click RETRIEVE MY DETAILS on the login bar at the top of the page. Once you have entered your existing password you will be able to view and change your personal details including email address, secret question and password.

Dead celebrities are not valid currency on Celebdaq.

As soon as news of a celebrity death breaks, the deceased celebrity will be removed from the site.

Should shareholders still own shares in the deceased celeb at the time of removal, their investment will be lost. Traders who are bankrupted as a result may be given a small amount to enable them to carry on trading. This will be dealt with on a case by case basis.

Find out more about Suspended/Removed Shares.

The Board reserves the right to suspend or remove celebrities from the index at any time.

A celebrity may be suspended without prior notice to allow us to investigate suspicious trading activity. Should this happen, the suspended share will still appear on the index and in shareholders' portfolios but shareholders will be unable to either buy or sell that particular issue.

In this event, a Shareholder Statement will be issued on the site to notify users of the reason for suspension.

If a celebrity is removed from the index e.g. due to death, the share will be completely removed from the index and from shareholders' portfolios. Shareholders will not be reimbursed should they still own shares after the removal of the celebrity.

For more information read What Happens When A Listed Celebrity Dies?

Down the left hand side of every page you have navigation options, grouped under headings: The Basics, Trading Floor and Market Lists. These links will take you to the main areas of the site.

If you want to find out about a particular celeb, go to the MARKET LISTS. Is your celeb a POP star? on TV? Click on the appropriate link and you'll see a list of all Celebdaq shares in that market. Then click the TRADE button next to their name to go to their profile page.

Too many celebs to find the one you want? Go to the Trading Tool inside your portfolio and then try the alphabetical list: click on a letter to list all celebs whose first name begins with that letter - e.g. "D" for David Beckham.

You can also use the drop-down lists at the top of the Market List pages. Click on the 'Celebrity' list to show all celebs - scroll through to see who's there and how much they're worth, then choose one and click GO.

To make it easier, you can filter the drop-down lists alphabetically: click the 'All' list and choose a letter. Now open the 'Celebrity' list again - and you just see celebs beginning with that letter.*

*This feature is not available on all browsers

VIEW/SET EMAIL ALERTS - You can tell Celebdaq to email you when a share moves by a set percentage - for instance, if Robbie Williams is at 2.00 now, but you think he's dropping, you might set an alert for -10. Then you'll know as soon as his price drops by that percentage - then you can quickly log in and snap him up.

Or maybe you bought a load of Babs Windsor shares cheap, and you want to know when they hit a high price so you can sell them off and make a tidy fortune. The skill lies in judging what prices you think each share might reach...

Go to your portfolio page and click the VIEW/SET EMAIL ALERTS link underneath the list of your shares. If you have not yet set any alerts, you'll see a very empty page: click the ADD NEW ALERT button to get started.

Choose a celeb from the list, type a short message to yourself, and enter your target price. Then click the SUBMIT button to set the alert.

You'll now find yourself back on the alerts page, with the new alert listed. You can edit or delete an alert at any time: just click the little round button next to the celeb, and then hit EDIT ALERT or DELETE ALERT.

NOTE: you cannot receive email alerts if you have changed your email options to 'turn off all mail'. Check this by going to your update details page.

In the fast-paced world of the celebrity stock market, you may lose money on your shares if you don't keep on top of the game, but if your account remains inactive for a set period of time, it will be deleted.

Traders whose accounts remain inactive for 30 days will receive a warning in their weekly email that their account will be deleted after a further 30 days if they don't continue to play the game.

This is to clear the game of unused accounts.

N.B. If traders opt to receive no mail from Celebdaq, they will not receive this warning. Find out how to change your email settings.

If you decide to delete your account you can do so in one of two ways.

If you receive emails from Celebdaq (daily or weekly) you can remove your account by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email. You will be given the following options:
a. I wish to stop receiving emails from Celebdaq
b. I wish to stop receiving daily emails from Celebdaq
. I wish to delete my Celebdaq account

Select option 3 and click submit.

Log in to your portfolio. To the left of your figures for the week you will see a link marked "UPDATE PERSONAL DETAILS below the list of your shares which will take you to the page where you should select the delete account option. You will need to enter your password in order to verify that it is your account.

In both cases the account will be deleted immediately and all details on the account and user will be removed.

RSS feeds are usually identified by an orange button, like this one on the Celebdaq homepage.

There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but the majority plump for 'Really Simple Syndication'. Put plainly, it allows you to identify the content you like and have it delivered directly to you.

In general, the first thing you need is something called a news reader. You can find out how to get a news reader here.

Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want and drag the address of the feed into your reader. We have a selection of feeds for you to choose from...