Online athletes stock market
p2p news / p2pnet:- It’ll literally be a whole new ball-game for sports fanatics if a plan by a new company takes off.
Jeff Ma was a member of the MIT blackjack team, “an infamous cabal of hyper-geniuses and anarchistic whiz kids who devised a method of card counting that took the gaming world completely by surprise,” stumping casinos for two years, says a University of Iowa post.
Ma is now one of the people behind Protrade which plans to make money out professional athletes by in effect buying and selling them in an online stock market.
“Under extensive development for more than two years by a ‘dream team’ of MIT statisticians, leading sports figures, and economists, PROTRADE has created a predictive market for athletes where sports fans can buy and sell shares in players around the clock, competing for cash and prizes,” says the promo blurb.
“PROTRADE’s athlete market is centered around a proprietary, real-time patent-pending system of algorithms that maps on-field performance to ‘earnings,’ for the first time truly quantifying how much game play helps or hurts a team’s chances to win.”
Athlete "prices" move up or down based on actual trading by an active community of sports enthusiasts, engaged in competitions to test their sports acumen, says the company, co-founded by Ma and Mike Kerns who “previously worked in sports management”.
Initially, Protrade will introduce baseball and basketball “markets” early next year, with plans to cover additional sports to be announced at a later date.
For its kick-off, the company secured a licensing arrangement with the National Football League Players Association, and is in talks wit other major sports associations, its says.
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See:-
Protrade – PROTRADE Unveils Innovative Athlete Stock Market , September 19, 2005
