An Amazon Engineer Is Trusting The Internet With $50k Of His Money On The Stock Market

The same internet who voted for Boaty McBoatFace...😳

Ever fancied channeling your inner Wolf Of Wall Street and dabbling in the stock market, but didn’t fancy blowing your life savings on a dodgy investment?

Well now a Seattle-based Amazon employee has decided to hand over $50,000 of his own life savings so strangers can test their stockbroker potential.

Engineer Mike Roberts was inspired to build StockStream, the world’s first multiplayer stock market game using real money, after years spent watching Reddit users anonymously give each other financial advice.

StockStream

The crowdsourcing experiment was debuted yesterday on Twitch, Amazon’s live video game streaming service. It has so far seen 60,000 players (or perhaps spectators) make a visit to the site.

The stream runs every day while the markets are open and anyone can vote on which stocks should be bought or sold in the channel.

Every five minutes a round of voting opens that runs for five minutes and then closes so that the transactions can automatically take place on ‘Robinhood’ - the popular portfolio management app.

The account is funded with $50,000 although due to FINRA/SEC regulations trading will halt if the amount falls below $25,000.

Roberts told Business Insider: “After the first day, I’m a lot more bullish than I already was.”

He was initially concerned about trolls, but after the first day things are generally looking up, apart from a few rogue choices like Cheesecake Factory and Papa John’s pizza.

In the future prizes could be offered to individual players with high trading scores.

The idea is reminiscent of 2014’s ‘Twitch plays Pokemon’ where more than a million Twitch viewers all shared control of the classic Nintendo Game Boy game.

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