Darren Herman

Maybe I’m listening to the likes of Howard Lindzon, Pip Coburn too much or Sherri is rubbing off on me (her career), but I’ve been watching the equities market much more in-depth lately.  Am I ready to become a trader?  No.  Would I ever want to be?  Probably not.  However, I think I have a neat idea for a game/business that I would love to see done.

The game would be simply titled:  Short or Long.  Much like Hot or Not, [where you are shown an image and you’re told to rate it 1-10], here, you would see the financial performance of a company (Google Finance snapshot), and would either click “Short” or “Long.”

After you click your answer (Short or Long), you would see aggregate information for each particular company, and if the companies name were withheld (just showing financial performance), it would show the actual company.

If you allow users to register accounts, you can chart their performance and benchmark them against their peers.  If you have a certain peer group (a high school class studying the stock market, your office, your buddies, etc), you can compete against each other.  If you really wanted to get tricky, you can short/long over time and specify a date.  Maybe even throw options into this (my uncle Bob has been showing me this tricky world) mix.

Revenue?  Oh yes, it’s a business.  Charge $10 for 100 trades ($0.10/trade) or more.  By doing this, it disables spammers to hype stocks as it becomes costly to do so.  I would love to see some sort of virtual goods model mixed into this as well, though I need to put some more thought into this.

Just my two cents – I like the idea and it’s less than half baked at this point, but would love to hear feedback.