he has 50k on the account, he can pay the platform fees. if the returns minus fees are higher than stock returns sans fees, it is game. and right now, it might as well be.
Bitcoin required a couple dollars per transaction, not to long ago.
You are overestimating his risk, right now, for stocks.
The current setup isn't likely to lose him much money. Throwing darts to pick your stocks will cause your stock portfolio to be surprisingly diversified.
Random stock pick is actually a not crazy investment strategy that is likely to get you the same amount of return as putting your money in an index fund.
Transaction fees in cryto, on the other hand, would cause him to lose 10k a month.
Thought a lot about this during the development period, but nothing materialized. I might do it someday but would probably need to ramp up the scoring algorithm first.
Why did you decide to do it with $50,000 and Robinhood instead of just creating a bot to trade stocks on an Investopedia stock simulator account? [0]
I mean, I understand that $50k might not be a lot for you, but if the aim is to see what the majority of random people on the internet feel like buying, while measuring the return of these decisions, this could be accomplished without putting up any actual money.
One of the reasons I decided to do this project in the first place is because nobody has ever done this before (at least based on my research), and I wanted to be the first. There are plenty of stock simulators out there, so fake money didn't sound appealing to me.
> The actual money aspect is why this blew up. No one would care if it was fake money.
Two things:
1. This is assuming it was done for the press coverage, and not just as a hobby project
2. If I were to do this, I don't think I'd advertise it was fake money. What's the difference anyway? It's not as if people on the internet benefit at all from the investment return. I always assumed this was more of a "Twitch plays Pokemon" thing than anything more serious.
I wasn't assuming it was about press coverage necessarily (though maybe it was), but that in order to be interesting it needs a critical mass of people participating. If it wasn't real money then that wouldn't happen.
Actually, those two bits are pretty small. Theres a ton of code all over github for interacting with Robinhood. The twitch chat API is really just IRC. Glueing those together was the easy part.
The more interesting and complicated components are the UI and the scheduling and a publish-subscribe module that I created, tho no plans to open source it anytime soon.
Actaully the pubsub part is pretty core to system overall. Basically I have a set of 'operations' modules each operating independently (gathering news, tweets, votes, stock quotes, etc). They publish that data over the pubsub system, so that all the subscribers (mostly in-memory caches) read and update accordingly.
Game events also get published through it (round end, trade placed, new round, etc)
Shouldn't really be any harder? 50k going in, pay taxes on profits, or get deductions on losses based on where things stand December 31st (that is, assuming there are any taxes at all before liquidation) ?
You need to report each trade to the IRS, plus some stocks are pass through in term of tax. Mainly oil stocks. It means you have to report their business expenses, profits, and revenues inside your own tax returns even with only 1 share. It's not a big deal, but that's result in lot of paperwork.
It's just how you do the accounting. For instance, you might buy a stock over time, and then sell it over time as the price is rising. You have to pay tax on those gains, but how you do it is a choice. You can do first-in-first-out, so the gains would be e.g. on the first 5 shares you bought vs. the first 5 you sold. You can also do first-in-last-out, which might make sense if you can get long-term capital gains rates on some trades.
It's kind of ridiculous, but most traders will have some sort of automated solution to help with it. The exchange you use should give you a nice report of your trades.
Currently working in Fintech, so my coworkers and I had talked about stockstream before. Had no idea it was you until I opened the link above and did a double take.
Coming back to Amazon Fulfillment soon. Just couldn't stay away.
The way your stream works I can't imagine you would lose that much, since the buys are in such small lots. There'd have to be a way for the users to make you go all in on a volatile stock to see those kinds of losses (or access to a sharper knife like options).
Anyway, it's an interesting experiment. Very popular over at /r/wallstreetbets.
There are no protections against trolls. At this point a dedicated group of less than a hundred could probably take over the vote.
I'd actually love to see more dedicated troll attacks. So far the main attack seems to buy $SEB since it's so expensive, but sometimes it later gets sold at a profit.
Personally, I've mentally written off the $50k so, I'll just be enjoying the show.
But how do you deliberately lose money? I think there's this idea that you could tank a portfolio with ease, but if that were true, shorting would be incredibly lucrative.
It's just as hard to lose money on stocks as it is to gain them (aside from racking up trade fees or something).