An Amazon employee made a social experiment: Twitch users manage their capital on the stock exchange.

Live broadcasts like many. Someone is looking at ways to play your favorite games, someone likes someone's performance, well, and someone arranges broadcasts on Twitch in the hope of earning or simply getting a piece of fame. In fact, there are quite a few interesting projects on video broadcast services. One of the most interesting can be called " StockStream ", this is a social and financial experiment, organized by an Amazon engineer.



This experiment is based on a similar project , which was launched in 2014. Then more than a million users of Twitch managed the main character of the pokemon game on the Nintendo Game Boy. Now this experiment is repeated, only the intention is slightly different. Instead of playing on video consoles, a game on the stock exchange is used. At stake is a $ 50,000 Amazon engineer who started it all. According to the author of the project, these 50 thousand - his savings. A few tens of thousands of people, both professionals and novice “stockbrokers”, play on the exchange with these funds.



True, someone really plays, and someone just looks. But this does not change the essence - the process is quite interesting and I would like to know what happens in the final.





Pokemon, run by millions of users three years ago



Robert, the so-called employee of Amazon, says that a similar idea has long been in the air, he himself planned to do something similar a couple of years ago. But that time was not enough, then the desire, and even money. Now, after six months of reflection, work on the project and heaps of calculations, the StockStream project has been published. And it turned out more sophisticated than the original plan.



The rules of the channel with the game on the stock exchange are quite simple: every five minutes a new round of voting is opened, so that Twitch users can give their assessment of what is happening and choose one of the proposed points of the game. Five minutes later, the voting is completed, the action with the maximum number of votes is selected and either an amount is deducted from the engineer’s account or the money goes into his account (if the shares were sold). Securities trading is done through the Robinhood app.



I must say, everything is going relatively well, in any case, the developer says that he is now much more optimistic than before. By the way, look at the course of trading on the stock exchange under this project here .



Participants in the action, whose tips were successful, receive points bonuses. If you, for example, bet on the purchase of Apple, and the company's shares then go up, that you get points. On the main page of the project champions are displayed with the maximum number of points. By the way, if the decision to buy or sell turns out to be unsuccessful, then the participant who proposed such a move loses a few points. The important point is that the players do not receive any reward, here the action is carried out for the sake of the experiment itself, and not the profit.



Robert himself believes that the idea was a good one. He regularly manages to increase the amount on the account, which, of course, would have liked many players on the exchange.



The developer says that he was previously worried about trolls who might, if they wished, disrupt the workflow. But doubts and experiences were in vain. And now everything is going well. Robert says that users have bought him a wide variety of stocks, so he now has a balanced package, which includes AMD, Tesla and Apple securities.







Robert says nothing to his viewers and participants in the project about his attitude to what is happening. According to him, they will play on the stock exchange not too qualitatively, if they find out bad (and maybe good) news. In this case, according to Robert, money is not the main thing, the main goal is to fulfill all the tasks of the mission as best as possible. So far, the amount in the account either increases or decreases, but there are no noticeable shifts.



However, in the experiment, the amount on the account from which transactions are carried out to acquire securities plays an important role. According to the FINRA rules , if the total amount falls below the level of $ 25,000, then the bidding will have to stop. And if the steps proposed by Twitch users fail, then below this level you can descend very quickly.