StockStream is a stock-picking game that has been circulating around the field of finance. Started by former Amazon engineer Mike Roberts, the stock-picking game launched in May 2017. Now with hundreds of thousands of viewers, the game has had a significant amount of attention. Along with StockStream's recent acquisition by the news network Cheddar, StockStream may have an even greater audience that watches the voting mechanism by which gamers choose to invest stock.
Upon launching the game, Roberts funded it with $50,000 of real money, allowing gamers full control of what stocks he should invest in or sell. While Roberts started the game in his apartment, Stockstream will now be located at Cheddar where Roberts will work on the game and other future projects. In addition to Cheddar doubling the online brokerage for StockStream from $50,000 to $100,000, Cheddar will create a livestream broadcast of the game to showcase on its network. In doing so, gamers and viewers alike will watch as StockStream either succeeds or fails to beat the stock market.
In just a short time however, the game has managed to beat the stock market more than once. In the last week of June alone, StockShare was .7% above the period while S&P and Nasdaq Composite only increased .6% and decreased .6%, respectively. This achievement comes in spite of the stock purchases made as a joke by certain players, such as the Cheesecake Factory (NASDAQ: CAKE) and Maui Land & Pineapple Company (NYSE: MLP), which has the same letters as the children animated fantasy television series based on horses, "My Little Pony".
Other significant shares that StockStream has invested in are Ford (NYSE: F), General Electric (NYSE: GE) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL).
The mechanism of the game a fairly simple - StockStream is programmed to make a trade every five minutes based on votes by players, such as "!buy MPL" or !sell APPL". After all the stocks are added and subtracted from the money, the trade is brought to the real world through the free stock-trading app Robinhood. In turn, players are scored by how beneficial their vote was, with players receiving points if their chosen stock performs well or losing points if it does not. While Roberts plans to make some adjustments to the scoring system in the future (as some players find the system hard to understand), a majority of the players appear to be unfazed overall as they talk to each other about various stocks in the public chat.
StockStream's new home on Cheddar will add an interesting, new public atmosphere for the small game. Given that Cheddar has recently been valued at $85 million, there are big hopes for the game through the news network, with the potential to reach even larger audiences. And it seems to be a good investment on Cheddar's part, seeing that the game is truly making strides with voting-based investment decisions. Even Roberts expanded on the unforeseen success of the game, saying that he is "actually quite surprised [and] pleased with how well the portfolio has been doing."