Two stockbrokers, with top flight computers, have a whole day to invest one million dollars and make it grow by the end of the day. The winner takes it all....all the money they made for that day.
Armed with nothing but their own information and a land line telephone they can call only the floor of the NYC exchange, and play the Dow 30. Hour after hour, on MSNBC the update will flash how they are doing.
Imagine the thrill when one broker is down by 8ook and comes storming back when the investment on those futures comes through and he/she wins.
The business the champion will bring to their firm will make the sport worthwhile.-- Dogcat, Mar 21 2008 I think your timescale is a bit wrong. I's advocate a TV show with a timeline of say 100 days, but even then I don't think the action would be all that dramatic.
Except on the rarest of occasions, you wouldn't get the kind of movements to make/break a fortune in a single day.-- Custardguts, Mar 21 2008 And how exactly does this differ from how Wall Street actually operates?
Oh, wait, no one calls the floor any more - it's all done via screens. What out-dated movie were you watching that inspired this?
I'm afraid that this "game" is simply what happens on Wall Street every single day. And it's plenty documented, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, on CNBC, and other financial news outlets.-- DrCurry, Mar 21 2008 How about a reality show where investors watch their hard-earned life savings go down the drain while corporate sharks make billions? It could be called "The Biggest Loser".-- nuclear hobo, Mar 21 2008 What [DrCurry] said. If you're interested just read the financial pages. They're full of long words, but don't let that put you off - it's just a soap opera about the champions and their firms.
The recent HBoS scandal was a good example of someone winning at this game by cheating - although they may yet get banged up for it.-- wagster, Mar 22 2008 Only if it does not glamorize any potential gains. There are enough people out there who do stupid things with money, don’t encourage them with Hollywood-promises. [+] if it can be made educational and exciting at the same time.-- sprogga, Mar 23 2008 I actually think this could be interesting, provided enough other angles were filled to keep things busy. After all, people will watch other people exchanging money purely on the basis of the random order of differently marked pieces of cardboard from a pack of 52.
Start, not with stockbrokers, but with amateurs (or teams of amateurs). Follow them over weeks (one series) rather than a day. Throw in some gimmicks, like being able to buy the advice of top financial gurus out of their earnings. Add a "celebrity investor" (a real financial wizard - see if the amateurs can do better than her). Add some side-topics, like giving the investors the opportunity to investigate companies using available data, or creating a little "internal market" where players can invest in eachother as well. Each week, throw out the worst performer and split his money pro rata amongst the remaining contestants. Throw in a few extra features, like vignettes on previous financial disasters of historical interest.
I think it might work - a bit like "the apprentice", but also interesting to people who would like to know more about investing.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 23 2008 Wouldn't they be better off with financial computers instead of flight computers?-- coprocephalous, Mar 25 2008 I think if done well like Maxwell described this could be a winner. Why not? If we can have The Apprentice and Hell's Kitchen we can have this?-- Germanicus, Apr 02 2008 I worked on a training event in Amsterdam for a US investment wank where they had a heap load of trading stations hooked up to simulated markets. The traders had to compete against each other during a series of simulated global financial disasters, trying to beat each other and "the monkey" - a random trading bot. There was also some sort of a simulated global power failure which had very serious consequences on both the markets and the traders.
It is possible we shouldn't have powered everything off a 3A socket...-- wagster, Apr 02 2008 random, halfbakery