About Ticker Tape
Every sports fan holds opinions that last longer than a single game, about the star who's about to get hot, the rookie nobody is talking about yet, or the big name whose numbers are running ahead of how he's actually playing, but until now there wasn't a place to put those opinions to work.
The gap we saw
Daily fantasy is built around one slate, and a sports bet usually settles in one game. Season-long fantasy asks you to draft in August and mostly live with it. Each of those is fun, but none of them lets you back an athlete for exactly the stretch you believe in, buying in when you see something and getting out when the story is told.
A stock market does exactly that. You can buy a star before a soft run of schedule and sell when it ends, pick up a player coming back from injury before everyone else notices, ride a rookie through his breakout month, or short a hot streak you're sure won't last. Your timing is yours, and every call you make is measured against everyone else's on the same board.
How it works, in short
Athletes and teams trade like shares, and their prices move only when people buy and sell. Behind the scenes we keep our own estimate of what each player's production is worth, built from his games with scoring designed for each sport, and over time the market tends to settle near it, which is what rewards the people who read players well. Everyone starts with $25,000 in play money, there are monthly and season contests with fresh budgets, and the market runs around the clock. How prices work has the full story.
We started with the NBA and NFL, the NHL is next, and MLB follows, with more leagues to come as the market grows.
Where the idea comes from
In 1997 a small team in Fairfax, Virginia launched Wall Street Sports, a free sports stock market where fans traded athletes by ticker with a million play dollars. By 1999 it had more than half a million members, and it closed in 2002. It was one of the great early sports communities on the web, and Ticker Tape is our attempt to bring that idea back with today's data, today's phones and a market that never closes.
Play money, always
Ticker Tape is played for fun with play money only. Nothing here can be bought or cashed out for real money, and you need to be 13 or older to join. If you have a question or an idea, we'd love to hear it through support.