Hi, there, do you like things? You know, things. Different kinds of things, like President Obama and Kim Kardashian and...uhhh...France?
Well, you're in luck because now you can express your enjoyment for those random things at a new virtual stock market called StockRay, which has recently gone live.
I may end up wasting a lot of time on this, but then again I may soon wander away from boredom. It's still too early to tell. StockRay says it is a New York-based startup founded by a couple of guys, "Treymour and Matt," who graduated from Harvard "a few years ago." So obviously we'll be talking about an IPO in five years. Or not! It depends on how much more engaging this thing gets.
One thing that makes me want to do more with it is that I desperately want to short the vastly overpriced Black-Eyed Peas. But I just got started and don't have enough fake cash to borrow Black-Eyed Peas shares, which recently traded at nearly 24 fake dollars.
So I bought 20 shares of Yoga to start off with and am slowly building my portfolio. Yoga seems underpriced to me at $9.83. Obviously the market doesn't have a lot of liquidity just yet, because my purchase of 20 shares of Yoga a little while ago seems to have helped jack up the price on the day.
So I've been searching for other random things to buy -- and what's available is super random, from Atheism to Downton Abbey.
The most actively traded stock appears to be Beer, up 44 percent on the day. Since buying Yoga, I have also bought shares in Gun Control and Stephen Colbert (both value plays).
But the point of this is all a little confusing. Like, I understand that if I buy stock in Jennifer Lopez, I'm betting on whether she's going to be more popular or not. I'll bet there are some good arbitrage plays like that. The Black Eyed Peas are a lot more expensive than Kanye West, for example. In what world does that make sense? A world of crappy music, that's what. I look forward to having an Icahn-Ackman-style fight with somebody about the value of the Black Eyed Peas. That should be easy.
But what about stocks like Hipsters? Or Climate Change? If I buy shares of Climate Change, what am I betting on, exactly? That people will like it more? Hate it more? Talk about it more?
In this way it's not exactly like online betting markets like Intrade, where you are making bets on very specific outcomes.
The other thing that kind of skeeves me about it is that you have to log in through Facebook, so you're sharing all of your public info with the company immediately. And then you have to make sure that all of your stock moves don't end up on your timeline. So if you're a furtive, paranoid freak like me, this can be off-putting.
And the variety of stocks you can trade is still minimal. The only NFL team you can bet on right now is the New England Patriots. But you can request new stocks, so that may change eventually.
I'm going to request a double-leveraged short-Black-Eyed-Peas ETF.