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If you’ve ever been curious about the stock market but you aren’t confident enough to try your hand at it with your own money, there are games out there that’ll let you trade with fake money against a real environment for practice. But what if you could play with real, actual money that, well, isn’t really your money?
Enter StockStream, an interesting new interactive game being held over at Twitch. Players can vote on stocks for a joint account to trade for through an actual Robinhood account that’s currently worth over $50,000. Every 5 minutes, a trade for the winning stock is made, with players able to vote to either buy or sell specific stocks.
The game element comes into play with the stock’s performance over time. If you voted to buy a stock and that stock gains value after the sale, you get points. If it drops in value, you lose points. Conversely, a vote to sell a stock that drops in price shortly afterward nets you points, while a stock that rises in price makes you lose points.
It’s worth noting that your performance in this regard doesn’t really mean anything. Whether you have a billion points or zero, you don’t get any sort of new abilities, increased voting power, or any rewards. It’s essentially just for bragging rights.
That said, the community at large does have a very good incentive to make sure you try and make the best trades possible: if the Robinhood account goes below $25,000, it’s game over. This is due to some regulatory restrictions in place, but also makes for a nice natural “goal” to encourage thoughtful votes and trades.
And because they don’t want the game to sway too much, they do also place restrictions on certain high-priced stocks to stave off the trolls who would look to jeopardize the ongoing health of the game. Understandable, really, considering someone’s actual funds are involved here.
This is all made possible thanks to Robinhood’s open API, which the developer uses to automatically submit trade requests at the aforementioned 5-minute intervals based on the public vote. On a related note, folks who choose to donate money to the stream will be glad to know that all donations will go toward buffing up that Robinhood account even more.
If you’re interested, you can follow the action over at the StockStream Twitch channel. You’ll need a Twitch account to participate as you’ll enter your votes using chat commands. And don’t forget to download the Twitch app for Android right here so you can keep playing on the go!
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