Twitch Literally Played The Stock Market, $50K Investment Chaos

When people think of Twitch, they usually see the platform as a streaming service for video game enthusiasts, if they know anything about it at all. However, an Amazon engineer recently changed the game by allowing users to take his $50,000 and use it to invest in the stock market through a new feature called Stock Stream. That’s right, Twitch literally played the stock market.

The Amazon engineer in question is Mike Roberts and as insane as it sounds, he basically gave thousands of dollars to anonymous Twitch users to invest in whatever stocks they wanted, Kotaku reports. Roberts described it as an online co-op game where real money was at stake, the first of its kind.

Playing was simple as well. More than 170,000 viewers logged on to see what was going on and in the comments section, users type either “!sell” or “!buy” to determine what would happen to the money. The game would then execute the most popular commands from the users in a five-minute interval. As it turns out, the players with the highest ranks are the ones who correctly predicted the most outcomes.

Of course, the game did have quite a few rules to abide by since it is dealing with the stock market. As Engadget points out, the money pool could not dip below $25,000 or the game would have had to be called off. The fact that it never went below that amount is simply astonishing, especially given the fact that the brokers were basically random people on the web.

Then again, this might have had something to do with the safety nets that a lot of trading system have in place. In any given day, for example, only up to 78 trades are really worthy of note. As a result, catastrophic losses are kept to a minimum.