How to Play Fantasy CEO

Fantasy CEO is like fantasy football, but instead of athletes, you're drafting chief executives. Your team's score is based on how their companies perform in the market and how they're covered in the press.

Getting Started

1. Create or Join a League

Start by either creating your own private league or joining an existing one with a league code. Each league can have 4-8 teams.

2. Draft Your Team

Once every seat in your league is filled, the commissioner can start the draft at the scheduled time. You'll draft 10 CEOs in a snake draft format.

The draft waits for a full league. A commissioner can set the date whenever they like — and should, so everyone can plan — but the draft won't begin until every seat is taken. If people don't show, the commissioner can lower the league's team count to match who's actually in.
Snake Draft: In Round 1, teams pick in order 1-2-3-4. In Round 2, the order reverses: 4-3-2-1. This continues alternating for all 10 rounds.

3. Compete for 13 Weeks

Your league runs for one quarter — 90 days, split into 13 weeks. Scores are calculated every trading day and your standings update automatically.

The Draft

CEO Pool

You'll draft from the top 100 CEOs by company market capitalization, spanning all major sectors:

Draft Strategy

Consider diversifying across sectors to reduce risk. Some players prefer stacking CEOs from industries they understand well. There's no single winning strategy!

Scoring System

Your team's score is calculated every trading day from two things:

📈 Stock Performance (50%)

The daily percentage change in each CEO's company stock price, multiplied by 10. Up 2.3% earns 23 points; down 2.3% costs 23. There's no cap — a big day is worth every point of it.

📰 News Sentiment (50%)

Each CEO is also scored on the tone of their press coverage over the previous seven days. Positive articles add, negative articles subtract, neutral ones do nothing, and coverage from major financial outlets counts double what smaller sources do. Because it's a rolling week, a good run of press pays off across several days rather than in one spike — and it's capped, so no single story decides your season.

What the 50/50 means: stock and news are tuned so that over a full season each contributes about half the points moving around your league. It isn't a per-day split — on any given day one will usually be bigger than the other.

💰 Compensation — not yet

Executive pay is planned but isn't currently worth points. The signal that matters is how a CEO's pay changes, and that needs a second year of filings to measure. Rather than score something we don't believe in, it sits at zero until the data supports it.

Example: NVIDIA closes up 3% and Jensen Huang has a net 1.5 weighted positive articles over the past week. That's 30 points from the stock move plus 54 from the coverage — 84 points for the day. Do that for all 10 CEOs on your roster and you have your team's daily score.

Full detail, including the exact formulas and how source tiers are weighted, is on the Scoring Rules page.

Winning the League

The season is a regular season of weekly head-to-head matchups followed by a playoff bracket. Each week your team's points are compared against one opponent's, and you take a win or a loss. Ties stay ties — there's no coin flip.

The 13 weeks

League Size Regular Season Playoffs
4–7 teams 11 weeks 2 weeks — top 4 seeds play semifinals, then the championship
8 teams 10 weeks 3 weeks — all 8 seeds play quarterfinals, then semifinals and the championship
Standings are sorted by win percentage, not by total points. Points only break a tie between teams with matching records. So a big scoring week is worth exactly one win — running up the score against someone doesn't buy you anything extra.

With an odd number of teams, one team has a bye each week. A bye is neither a win nor a loss and doesn't count toward your record, so nobody is penalised for the weeks the schedule can't pair them — your CEOs still score, there's just no opponent that week.

A high season total isn't automatically a title. In a smaller league most of the field reaches the bracket anyway, so the regular season is largely about seeding — and then you need points in the weeks that count.

Strategy Tips

Ready to Play?

Create your league and start drafting today!

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