Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy stock market simulation run by Yahoo! Research and O'Reilly Media. It is a dynamic pari-mutuel market, where almost 16,000 players predict what people will be searching the Internet for in the future. More specifically, what Tech Buzz Game Stocks people will be searching for using Yahoo! Search. You buy stock in technologies you believe will be popular, and do the opposite for stocks you predict will have the opposite result.
Contents
Rules
This is a general overview of the rules; for more information, please visit the second link.
Each player starts out with ten thousand fantasy dollars. This money can be spent on any stock, any amount. There are forty-nine 'markets,' each with stocks (totalling 299) specific to the category that market represents. Each market is a zero-sum, where any player's gain is averaged out by the other player's losses. The prices for the stocks are determined by a ratio: the ratio for any two prices in a market is equal to the ratio of outstanding shares for those two stocks. In addition, players can make money through dividends, which are given every Friday night, at around 6:04pm EST. Dividends are calculated through this formula:
Dividends = market cap * buzz score * three percent.
The dividends are distributed evenly based on number of shares.
Markets
Overall, there are 49 distinct markets in the Tech Buzz game, containing a total of 299 stocks.
One of the more active and popular markets currently played in Tech Buzz is the Atlantic Hurricanes Market. This unique and constantly changing market allows players to invest in past and upcoming tropical storms. There is a lot of money to be won and lost in the market, with many players constantly reading the NHC weather forecasts to ensure they have the latest information on the storm to help guide their investment decisions.
Fatal Flaw
The game proved to be a success but there was a flaw in the programming that allowed two 17-year-olds to exploit this flaw and cause some big errors to occur in the game. Because when you bought into one stock it caused the value of another stock in the same industry to fall you were able to commit arbitrage by buying the falling stock, selling the original stock, and then sell the stock that fell at a profit. Two kids with the name Torch (Joe Molinari) and GreenLantern (Jacob Hensley) were able to use this and earn large gains. Yahoo tried to fix the problem by not allowing a single person to purchase more than one stock in a single industry but Torch and GreenLantern were able to work together to again exploit this flaw. Yahoo later banned these two individuals from the game because of the fatal flaw they found. This is documented in an industry journal that was given to Jacob Hensley from David Pennock, one of the researches in charge of the game from Yahoo.