StockStream Game Lets You Play With $50,000 of Someone Else's Cash

It is now streaming on Twitch live and you can watch it here.

4

Have you ever wanted to invest in the stock market, but didn't have the cash to do it? A new social experiment game called StockStream is letting "players" make buy and sell trades with $50,000 of an Amazon engineer's money.

The brainchild of Mike Roberts, the game is streaming live on Twitch, and has already had more than 385,000 views. The way it works is viewers have five minutes to choose a stock and the number of shares. The stock with the most votes then is immediately purchased or sold, no questions asked. The stream tracks Roberts' portfolio in real time via the Robinhood stock app. Players "score" based on how well the stock does. If it does poorly, points are subtracted. The scoring system is a bit complicated, but Roberts said he hopes to simplify it in the coming weeks.

Roberts told Business Insider that he got the idea for the game, which launched on May 30, from users on sites like reddit crowdsourcing public opinion in the next stocks they should buy. The game is a bit more of a refined approach. "After the first day, I'm a lot more bullish than I already was," he said. 

Right now there are no prizes or payouts, but Roberts said it is a good testbed for people new to investing to see if their hunches on stocks are good or not. He said he has gotten a few weird orders, such as Cheesecake Factory and Papa John's, but for the most part, investors are focused on stocks like Google, AMD, and Tesla. The only catch is that federal regulations require that his account stay above $25,000 to allow him to keep trading. He has said he has been lucky that no one has really set out to sabotage the experiment.

The stream is live whenever the market is open, and Roberts said that he is just having fun watching the game progress.

Check out the stream to see what it's all about.

Contributing Editor
From The Chatty
Hello, Meet Lola