“The idea is to capture the mood and sentiments of cricket fans and translate them into numbers which will be reflected by stock-prices “informed Rahul Roushan, final year student of postgraduate programme of IIMAand one of the developers of the website. Currently the website has issued IPO (Initial Public Offering) of all the international cricketers oftest-playing countries. A person gets one million of virtual cash as soon as he registers with the website and he can use that money to buy shares of anynumber of these cricketers. He has to bid within a specified price range for buying the shares of different cricketers.

“Currently it’s just 20 pc of the website that is up with the IPO. Shares would be allocated to bidders immediately after the opening ceremony of the World Cup. The rest of the site will also be launched then, which will include trading features, discussion forums, news, profiles of cricketers etc.” said Karthik Laxman, another final year student of IIMA who is associated with the website. The website has attracted hundreds ofregistered users within a couple of days of launching. People have registered from different cities of India and even from countries like Pakistan, England, Australia, USA et al. and the numbers are growing as more people are learning about it.

“It’s also a fun way to learn how a stock exchange functions. You will get dividends based upon how your stock-companies or your cricketers perform on field, and you can earn capital gains by selling shares of high performing cricketers” Karthink added. All these functions would be available oncesecondary market opens. Right now people can register and bid in the IPO to get the shares of their favorite cricketers.

The team comprises of Rahul Roushan, Karthik Laxman, Siddartha Murlidharan (all of them final year MBA students of IIM Ahmedabad), and Mitanshu Garg (3rd year student of IIT Roorkee). Kaushik M (computer science alumnus for BITS, Pilani, and currently working as a software professional) gave valuable inputs to professionalize the website.

The team expects the website to attract both cricket lovers and people who want to learn about basics of stock market. We are thinking about adding other cricketing parallels from real stock exchange like Mutual Funds, Options and Futures etc, once the website attracts enough dedicated users and the World Cup is over. One can learn these complex tools in a fun was with the help of cricket. But for the duration of World Cup, only simple trading of shares will take place.

More about functioning of the website can be known from http://www.cricstock.com/faq.htm