Playing the markets for fun

TEAMTRADERS:IF YOU'VE ALWAYS fancied a flutter on the stock market but never had the money to try it, TeamTraders is a free, virtual stock-trading game where you can see just how good you are. What makes the game unusual is that its developers, Kevin Egan and Mark Dunne, have secured a licence from the New York-based Nasdaq stock exchange to use its real-time data as the feed for the game.

“We’re one of a small number of people licensed to use the Nasdaq data and the only ones using it for a stock-trading game,” Egan says. “By linking virtual money to the live stock market we can basically provide the best stock-trading game on the internet.”

Free access to the game is a key part of the company’s business model as it needs big numbers in order to make its money from online advertising. The game was quietly launched in December 2010 and already has 1,500 users with targets of 150,000 users within 18 months and half a million within three years.

TeamTraders has been getting a lot of interest from third-level institutions who already use stock-market games to teach investment awareness to students. “There are 30,000 business students in Ireland, 300,000 in the UK and three million in the US so the academic market is a primary target,” Egan says.

The company has just raised private funding to support an initial foray into the UK and it has also been assisted by the Westmeath Enterprise Board. Egan is a recent graduate of the DIT Hothouse programme.

Anyone signing up for TeamTraders is given a virtual $100,000 to play with. “By trading shares in a realistic environment, players can educate themselves, research companies and stay up-to-date with the latest market news with absolutely no risk,” Egan says. “They can also compete against friends or family or other registered users to win prizes.”

Egan has a background in business development in the financial services sector while Dunne is a software developer.

“We could have paid a fortune to buy an existing platform but we decided to build our own because we felt we could do a better job. We now have a really good platform to which we can add new options and features as the company develops,” Egan says.