Stockstream lets Twitch viewers buy and sell stocks using an Amazon engineer's $50,000 initial investment. Here it is at 10:55 a.m. ET on 7/10/2017.
Apparently it pays to have other people do your trading for you.At least that's the case for Mike Roberts, the former Amazon engineer whose viral stock-picking game StockStream was acquired by streaming financial news network Cheddar, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The concept of StockStream is a novel one, crowd-sourcing investment decisions from users who vote on which stocks should be bought and sold. Roberts, who fronted $50,000 of his own money to kickstart the operation, has programmed the game to make a trade every five minutes based on voting results.
Now Roberts will be doing so as an employee of Cheddar, which acquired StockStream for an undisclosed amount. He'll expand the game's offerings and work on other projects down the line.
For starters, Cheddar will double the original account balance to $100,000 and expand the asset classes available for investment, such as commodities. The live stream of Roberts' game will also be incorporated into Cheddar.
The portfolio managed in the game has actually beaten equity benchmarks since its launch. It's up roughly 0.7% over the period, compared to a 0.6% increase for the S&P 500 and 0.6% loss for the Nasdaq Composite.
When StockStream was first launched in May, Roberts said that the idea had been kicking around the web for years, with users of sites like Reddit letting anonymous commenters vote on the next stock they should buy. Roberts released StockStream as a more focused, and applied, version of that concept.
As for scoring, players are rated according to how their stocks perform. If you suggest buying Apple, and it pops right after the trade is made, you get points. But if it dives, your score is docked accordingly. Roberts said at the time of launch that the current scoring system is confusing for a lot of players, and will likely be revamped.
Check out Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Eisen's full story here.