Fantasy premier leagues have always been fun in terms of the thrill it gives when you virtually own a football team and so on. It’s extends a near to reality environment, where one can do what they want in a virtual environment. Stock battle is one such fantasy league, but for stock market, founded by brothers Lee Lowden and William Lowden.
William Lowden derives background is that he is a stock market and trading enthusiast. Begins and ends his day with stock related activities. William is a co-founder and non-executive chairman of Stock Battle. He received his undergraduate degree in Finance from Wake Forest University. Lee Lowden is a serial entrepreneur, he found his first company while in high school. Since then he has embarked on five ventures, selling his first business at age 21. He is a co-founder and CEO of Stock Battle. He has worked at Bessemer Trust, a wealth management firm in New York City, and J.P. Morgan Chase in their private bank in Greenwich, Lee will be finishing his senior year at Wake Forest University as a Business major soon.
So what is Stock Battle?
StockBattle.com is a Pay-to-Play virtual stock market trading competition platform with real cash prizes in every competition. Users trade stocks with virtual money and compete against friends and other traders to win cash prizes.
“Stock Battle, StockBattle.com is a fantasy stock market trading platform, offering players the ability to experience the thrills of real-time stock exchange trading, while minimizing risk. Stock Battle offers fast-paced competitive stock trading tournaments with real money prizes in every competition. All of Stock Battle’s tournaments are pay-to-play, meaning that a player enters a competition with an entry fee and competes for cash prizes.” Lee says.
All of Stock Battle’s stock market data is real-time, simulating a true stock market trading experience. Stock Battle is based in Greenwich, CT / New York City.
How does it all work?
A user pays an entry fee to compete in tournaments of various lengths against other users, resulting in the best performers winning cash prizes. A user can choose from a variety of competitions on the website’s lobby page and are given a virtual $1,000,000 to trade over the course of the competition. No single stock can represent more than 25% of a user’s virtual portfolio value. At the end of competitions, those users with the highest portfolio returns win cash prizes determined by the prize payout structure. Cash prizes are credited to users’ accounts immediately upon the completion of a tournament. Users can add or withdraw funds at anytime.
William Lowden came up with this idea from both being experienced in stock trading and through loving online daily fantasy sports. He saw a tremendous market opportunity to combine the fantasy sports business model with finance. As a result, he came up with the idea for StockBattle.
Their biggest hurdle was getting accepted with PayPal and with Credit Cards as Paypal is strict in regards to the online gaming industry. There are currently millions of people who trade in virtual stock market portfolios to gain knowledge and test their trading skills.
“Our website is a realistic, competitive, and thrilling alternative. When you introduce the real money aspect into virtual stock market trading, it really changes the entire feel of the game, the drive behind research, and it creates a thrill and competitiveness as compared to a competition without real-money on the table” he says.
Stock battle is trying to innovate financial education and helps amateur stock investors and students to get interested and involved in finance and the stock market through competitive, real-money gaming. This is something which usually does not occur at a young age.
He says “We do not have direct competitors in our industry. The only competitors that we could think of would be other virtual stock trading websites. Although, they do not have the real-money gaming aspect on these sites, we view them as both a threat and an opportunity”
Lee is confident that Stock Battle will see extreme growth in terms of user base, increase competition sizes, and increase competition prize pools. And they plan to offer larger tournaments with larger prize pools, as their user base grows.
“In a year, we would like to see around 100,000 members on our website, trading in daily, weekly, and monthly competitions. The FinTech (Financial Technology) gaming space has a very large potential. With the Stock Battle platform, we are spearheading this space and are creating an entirely new finance real-money gaming industry” he adds.
Stock battle has a spectrum of target audience ranging from students, finance/stock market enthusiasts, and amateur stock traders within the United States.