The Free Market

Kunal was all jumpy about doing a Stock Market Stimulation, but Mayank did not want it to be a copy of WoodStock and neither did I.

But after the Global Economic Meltdown and then an hour of Muhrat Trading on CNBC, I found that having a Stock Market for Mukti '09 was too good a thing to resist!

Why not make a Stock Market, in which people buy and sell shares of ... yes... Open Source Softwares.

While it will help in publisizing those softwares, if will also help increase traffic on the Mukti website. Here are some salient features:

1. Named "The Free Market" after the style inspired by the Hippies. Tagline "Share with shares" (if you have a better tagline please do tell me, although I'm not compromising with the event name.) :P

2. We start with 20 companies named after Open Source Softwares, we decide the Market Cap for each and the no. of shares to distribute in the Market.

3. Initial Public Offers of duration one week. People register as users and are allotted a sum of 1 Lakh. They are to bid for the stocks within the mentioned price band.

4. Allocation of the shares are to be done. If shares are over-subscribed, they are distribited as a percentage of the no. of shares available. If under-subscribed, the rest of the shares goes to an Under-Writer (in this case the admin). The admin can then sell the shares back to the market when he thinks fit.

5. Trading to be open for 2-3 weeks from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Traders are to react to random dummy news clip marquees, to buy/sell the shares. The price of the shares are to go up/down depending on real-time buying/selling pressure.

6. There will be a ticker to show live prices of the shares. Also past performances of the shares may be tracked using graphs(difficult task to implement until I get the right tool for it). The Free Market Index or freemex is a measure of the movement of the Free Market and is calculated and displayed real-time on the basis of the weightages of the stocks.

7. Events such as Splits, Stock Mergers and Acquisition, New IPO's and Delistings may be incorporated to make the game more fun!

8. Brokerage will be charged at 1% of each transaction.

For this I am going to do the Ruby on Rails Learning Curve, which may save some tedious coding.

More on this later.... Suggestions are welcome!