Twitch viewers have a new challenge: The stock market
If you gave the streaming video service $50,000 to play with on the stock market, what would happen? Let's find out!
Twitch played Pokemon. It defeated Dark Souls. Now the Amazon-owned streaming service is trying to beat the most nefarious game of them all... the stock market.
StockStream, which launched Tuesday, is Twitch's latest chat-powered venture into seeing whether the wisdom of crowds is actually wise at all. Every 5 minutes, the most popular demand to buy or sell a particular stock is acted upon, with a single share bought or sold. Individual users earn points for successful investment advice, and anyone can donate to keep the account going, but that's all window dressing. The most important question is obviously whether Twitch can succeed on the stock market.
After starting with $50,000, the account has $38,938 on hand, at the time of writing. Should the account dip below $25,000, trading will cease. But after beating nearly every challenge thrown at it to date, we're not about to count out the Twitch chat crowd quite yet. UPDATE: As of 1:00pm PT Wednesday, the account is down to $26,059. Yikes.
The project is the brainchild of a single software developer, who goes only by "Mike," and who contributed the account's initial investment.
"I saved it up, and as for who benefits it'll just be me. I mean, I'm taking all the risks," Mike told PC Gamer.
And for those who may even start to think a public chat saying "SEB" repeatedly is something from which to pull credible stock market insights, consider that the channel clearly states that it's "not intended to and does not constitute legal advice or investment advice."