Twitch is an avenue for people to view other people play games and lately to play games together with other people. While most of the time users log-in to watch popular streamers play their favorite video games, recent developments have started to allow viewers to participate and even play a game as a team. An interactive Twitch stream called Stock Stream reportedly encourages players to trade stocks up to $50K.
According to reports, Stock Stream appears to be a social experiment in chaos, collaboration, and obviously business. The financial Twitch stream was apparently developed by a software engineer named Mike. He was supposedly inspired by a similar experiment that was done before using Arch Linux on a computer, says Polygon. The program gives Twitch users timed rounds to vote on buy and sell commands, which is automatically tallied by the software at the end of each round and initiates the trades valued at $50K.
The co-op stock trading Twitch stream was made possible by an anonymous trader who shared $50K for gamers to manage. It has proven to be a hit as several users carefully vote on what stocks to sell or to buy in order to keep the live stream from going downhill. According to Kotaku, the stock trades are handled by a free app called Robinhood. However, the maximum trades it can accomplish in a day is limited to 78, and the balance of the account has to remain above $25K as indicated by the SEC rules.
It is interesting to know that the $50K worth of stock trades are being done together by a group of different Twitch users. The official channel description claims that "there is no point other than to have fun, to learn something, to let chaos reign, to beat the market or go for broke." Each voting round in Stock Stream is limited to five minutes for participants to vote to buy or sell stocks. The game keeps track of the stocks that result in gains or losses and adds or subtracts a fraction of the total percentage of the user's score. It is currently reported as a very popular stream on Twitch.
