
Show HN: I built a stock market game based on the top 50,000 websites - thehodge
http://linkdaq.net
======
polemic
This actually would have a lot of value, if it were executed slightly
differently.

Online trading markets are excellent at exposing 'insider information', but
the prices have to be informed by (a) availability of stock and (b) the
ability for traders to negotiate prices between themselves.

In this instance, the valuation is based on:

 _"...a simple formula to give each domain a daily price."_

So, what does this achieve? It rewards the user(s) who can best approximate
the formula, gather the requisite information and act on it. In other words,
the best performers are those that can best emulate the workings of the site.

Ok, it is called "LinkDAQ" for a reason - but there is an opportunity here to
build something linked to real value.

It would be better to seed initial stock values from such a formula, but then
leave users to trade between them. Stocks "cash out" during [real] funding
rounds, dividend payouts or difference in actual stock valuations. If you can
refine the market sufficiently, you should have a reasonably informative
prediction engine.

I've been a long time user of the iPredict prediction market in NZ
(ipredict.co.nz) - but that's small biscuits next to InTrade, for example.

~~~
alexirobbins
Do you think it would make sense to issue X shares for each site, and then
split the shares at Y value?

And in real stock exchanges, companies issue shares of the company, so they
have real value. InTrade links its share value to the likelihood of something
happening - but the goals of websites/startups vary greatly, so it's difficult
to set a fixed standard that way.

You might also be able to set up a market in which shares only have value
because of scarcity, but I think it would be difficult to convince people to
buy them in the first place, which is why starting with funny money might
actually be a good move in trying to establish this sort of market.

And should sites be allowed to apply for the exchange? Do you think you could
allow the companies that own these sites to sell actual shares to accredited
investors using a Funders Club model?

~~~
polemic
Could do. The biggest problem with the whole thing is, you really need to link
the stock price to cash, and that makes it a futures market, with all the
regulation it comes with.

If it were bitcoin based tho....

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thehodge
Hey HN, this weekend I built a stock market game based on a dataset of the top
million sites (ordered by the amount of links pointing towards them)

It needs quite a bit of tweaking but that will come as I get more data,
reaction so far as been great but I'd love some comments from HN :)

~~~
thehodge
The base price will update once a day (on average) but I'm hoping to build
something based on facebook likes and twitter tweets that affects it and we
can check that a few times a day without doing affecting the endpoint servers

~~~
bo1024
I think you're thinking about this a bit backwards.

In the study of e.g. prediction markets, the idea is that if the price is too
low, lots of people will try to buy it. Then the price gets raised up to
compensate. If the price is too high, lots of people will try to sell it, and
the price gets lowered to compensate.

What all this means is that __the traders don't learn info from you, you learn
info from them __. You shouldn't have to put any information into the prices.
If you have a supply/demand matching algorithm, then the prices will _give_
you the information.

~~~
bo1024
I should've added, the prices have to be tied to some value.

So for example, what you could do is give everyone 10,000 play dollars at the
start, and they can buy/sell whatever "sites" they want at the going prices.
But every day (week?), there's a payout -- if you own one share of site X, and
site X is #n in the rankings, you get a dividend of say 50,000 - n cents.

Then if I think that site X will be in 1000th place, I should be willing to
pay up to $490.00 for a share, because that's how much I expect it to pay off
for me. Something like that.

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amwelles
No vanilla registration? I don't really want this linked to my Facebook or
Twitter account. I also didn't see what the prize for "winning" is.

~~~
thehodge
I'm happy to add that but this is the first request :) the prize is a mystery
prize (but I also own a sweet shop so you could take a guess ;) )

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csomar
I'll make the third request in a comment since you can't see the upvotes.

~~~
sukuriant
And a fourth

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ashleyw
Looks similar to Urladex (<http://www.urladex.com>), which uses the Alexa API.

I used to have a lot of fun designing my own naive trading algorithms and
terminal based dashboards, so I'd love to see an API!

~~~
thehodge
I'd love to talk about how I can take the factors and make a decent stock
price with someone who actually knows a bit about stocks!

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sowhatquestion
As of 6:30ish p.m. EST, this
(<http://linkdaq.net/sites/247vicodindrugstore.com>) is one of the top "movers
and shakers"... Can that be where the prize comes from? ;)

~~~
thehodge
if you play your cards right ;)

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dbh937
I noticed that in the url when searching there is a parameter "?utf8=✓". I
just thought the use of ✓ was a little odd, and was wondering why this choice
was made.

~~~
pash
Because it can be—UTF-8 is enabled. It's kind of cute to use a character from
the extended set to indicate that.

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kyro
Related idea time!

So this is really great, and for a while I've been thinking about what a stock
market game for pop culture would be like. It'd serve as a great discovery
tool, like searching for that penny-stock that's going to blow up, and it'd be
a great way for fans and haters of particular celebrities to duke it out in
the market place (think of the 50 Cent / Kanye competition, or the rabid fans
of Chris Brown and those who detest him). You could gather information from
across a whole host of resources (imdb, movie ticket / record sales, tabloid
sites, twitter, spotify plays) to come up with predicted performance forecasts
for each celebrity. Something like that would make people feel they played a
direct part in a particular success story. Early "investors" would be
considered more loyal fans, you could incentivize using concert tickets and
schwag, etc, etc - there are lots of ways to 'gamify' it.

~~~
mshang
Sounds a bit like Fat Dog Exchange. Does anyone know what happened to that
site?

~~~
stevesearer
Also similar to Hollywood Stock Exchange:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Stock_Exchange>

~~~
cing
Hollywood Stock Exchange also holds a patent for the core principles behind
prediction market games like these
(<http://www.google.ca/patents?id=n2sXAAAAEBAJ>).

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Baltoli
You can buy a negative number of shares, resulting in you gaining ludicrous
amounts of money very quickly (although my fraudulent purchases seemed to be
removed after a couple of minutes.)

~~~
thehodge
Yep I was emailed and tweeted this a few minutes after the first one was
spotted.. that's fixed and deployed now :)

I'll look for you in the database and reset your dollars

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kokey
Nice, years ago I used to enjoy playing with Blogshares. I also started coding
something similar to this years ago, while I was wondering how one could make
money from it. I toyed with the idea of a virtual currency which would be a
share in the total real money value market, adjusting upwards and downwards
based on your share performance. I think the main issue against this is that
it's not like trading on a market, it's making a bet and this could probably
be considered a form of gambling.

~~~
thehodge
Yeah to be honest I haven't thought like that at all, if it gets popular I
thought of selling a sponsor slot on the shares.. or doing some sort of
promotion within the daily stock update emails..

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alexirobbins
This is fantastic! I've been considering this idea for a while - it 1) could
become a legitimate way to invest in tech startups, and 2) could inform
smarter investment - the best startups can get spotted faster. Great job
making it!

EDIT: it is fairly easy to game it, might want to carefully pick a set of
sites (news/blogs/etc.) to scrape to impose some controls?

~~~
politician
If you can't wish for unlimited wishes, wish for unlimited genies. Or in this
case, unlimited Twitter accounts earning $10,000 of funny money per account.

~~~
alexirobbins
ask for socials? square does it..

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mtgx
So I'm interested but I have neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook account.
What do I do?

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praveenhm
Nice site. How did you manage to get the data? what are API used?

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jaxn
<http://www.blogshares.com> has been around for years. I used to play that
regularly.

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DesaiAshu
I think this would make a really neat mobile game! If you're interested in
building it into one, drop me a line (ashu@makegameswith.us)

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jack_lockyer
Just bought $10,000 worth of Hacker News shares!

~~~
jack_lockyer
And another $5,000

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TomGullen
Very fun and good idea :) Prize can never be too lucrative though as it would
be easy and fairly cheap to game it.

~~~
thehodge
I run a hack day where the main prizes are from the pound shop.. I know how to
do a cheap prize ;)

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dude3
Interesting concept and nice site. But, built in 24 hours? If you did actually
accomplish that, props.

~~~
thehodge
I've got a video I'll be uploading onto youtube of the first 12 hours coding,
I'll comment with a link tomorrow as its 2am now :)

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C0d3r
You gotta trim the string upon searches. Very good design and idea, hope it
gets to be a good game.

~~~
thehodge
just patched that locally, will deploy it next :)

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mahmud
Good way to monetize DoS attacks ;-)

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unkoman
Japanese characters in username doesn't seem to work when connected from a
twitter account.

~~~
thehodge
thanks I'll add that to the list

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simonrobb
I think this is the closest thing I've seen to valid use of the marquee tag.

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davejazz
I built the same concept for viral videos. Http://vvx.io - we should talk.

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jcmoscon
Very interesting idea. Do you mind sharing what language/db was used?

~~~
thehodge
Sure It's Ruby / Rails + MySQL

~~~
justinsoong
How did you implement order matching?

~~~
fmstephe
I would like to second this question. Is the implementation based on a market
where users buy and sell shares from each other, over some kind of exchange,
or are we buying and selling shares from the site itself?

Great idea. Look forward to having a go.

(I ask because I am writing up an exchange as a side project just for fun :)

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niggler
Requires facebook or twitter login -> nonstarter

~~~
catshirt
especially unfortunate timing since i deleted both my twitter and facebook
accounts this evening (SELL SELL SELL!). too bad, looks like a fun site.

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brandoncapecci
Would be nice if you added the ability to short...

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fudged71
Neat idea, great implementation. Kudos

~~~
thehodge
Thanks!

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DanBlake
Another one was alexadex iirc

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nchuhoai
would love the ability to short some sites

~~~
thehodge
Your not the first person to request that, looks like I have some research to
do

~~~
jcmoscon
What about buying and selling options?

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peterhajas
Wow! Fun!

Any hope for an app?

~~~
thehodge
if the site actually gets used I'd probably just create an API and let others
play..

