An engineer allows Twitch play the stock market with his money

Most people would not want a bunch of random strangers playing around with their money on the stock market, but that is exactly what Mike Roberts is doing through Twitch, Amazon.com Inc.’s popular live streaming platform for gamer. A new game called Stock Stream employs the same method, allowing Twitch viewers to play the stock market — with somebody else's money, at that. 

The game, which went live only recently, lets viewers of the stream cast a vote every five minutes on which stocks to buy or sell, using $50,000 provided by a software developer. Whichever gets the most votes is automatically initiated via Robin hood, a free trading app. Joining is as easy as writing "!sell" or "!buy" .

Mike Roberts, an Amazon engineer, is the programmer bankrolling Stock Stream, entrusting thousands of dollars to random Twitch users, letting them invest in whatever they please. It's bonkers of course — but it plays into the crowd source gaming concept supremely well.In its current form, Stock Stream offers no reward to players other than the satisfaction of a job well done. Though as Mike notes on the website, "in the future prizes may be offered to players with high scores."

"I wanted something with real-world effects, real-world consequences for what you type into that chat," said Roberts. “Before today, I was a bit skeptical — thought I might lose money quickly, but things seem OK,” Roberts said. “Now that a lot of the money is diversified, the swings in value should start getting bigger.