Twitch Plays The Stock Market: $50,000 Invested For Social Experiment

If you enjoy social and economic experiments than I have got the story for you. I found this story off of PCMag and thought that I would give it my two-cents. The experiment is called stockstream and it allows Twitch users to be real world traders on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Twitch is known as a live streaming service that gets millions of views per day to watch people play all different kind of video games.

People have found creative ways to play popular video games like Pokemon and Dark Souls which relied on crowd sourced feedback to complete them. Communities and subreddits grew from these play through’s even dividing people. While those were interesting social games, this one has the financial and real world stake that makes you invested, no pun intended.

While some may not call this a game, I believe what Mike, the software Engineer who created this stream, has done is one of the most interesting games. His initial investment was to allow $50,000 USD to be invested, from his own pocket, by the Twitch audience. He created a simple interface that works with the trading platform Robinhood and through a voting process makes a trade every 5 minutes during the operating hours of the NYSE. Depending on how well the trades do, Twitch users get points that

Below is the live stream where you can see the trading action.

I’m interested in seeing how the Twitch community is able to navigate the complexities of the stock market and if a fully automated system such as this can end up being profitable in the long run or will the money disappear from inexperienced buyers. Polygon interviewed Mike about his project and was told that initially he was very nervous about how well this might do and would stop the bidding if his total value dropped below $25,000. It seems though that Twitch is dong a pretty good job at not losing money as Mike is currently in the black with his initial investment. Maybe this will make Mike the biggest genius by letting what seems like a game for everyone else make him a future millionaire, only time will tell.

Picture at top. Man working on computer stock exchange. Creative Commons pixabay.com no author