I'm not a programmer, but I am imagining that you are contemplating some kind of algorithm that takes from the posted words in the WO thread to give each poster a speculation direction score or price prediction accuracy score?
No, I'm imagining a game that's at least somewhat separate from normal posts. At the very least you'd have to specifically indicate your prediction in your post contents so that the system could understand. (But I'm
really imagining a separate website that's not linked to posts.)
Interpreting post contents is too difficult. Modern AI is powerful enough that you could probably do it with >90% accuracy, but it'd still be too inaccurate to actually be satisfying, and designing and training an AI to be even halfway decent would take tons of time.
2) price prediction must be matched with a time frame - once price hit, +1 score? or would those game this by playing volatility and pick a price close to current price? (must be atleast a # % away from current price?)
There are many possible ways of doing it. If I were to create the game, I think I'd do it in the style of parimutuel betting, but using play-money chips. So:
- If you're willing to bet at least 10 chips, you could create a new prediction, like "I predict that the price will be between x and y at time t".
- People could bet on either side of existing predictions.
- Once the prediction is decided, the chips of the wrong side would be distributed amongst the betters on the right side, somewhat-proportionally to their respective bets. However, the rewards formula would need to give more reward to people who placed bets earlier than others. (You could copy the rewards formula from one of the existing parimutuel betting sites.)
- Whenever you have less than 10 chips, you're given chips so that you have 10 chips. So even if you're constantly wrong, you can still keep playing.
- Your speculation score equals your current number of chips.
It sounds like it'd be fun to write the game as I described, but it'd probably take me ~40 hours, and I just can't spend that kind of time on such a niche feature.
Just start with a forum competition: big announce for all forum including locals, make Google form with price prediction at the end of the week and username > Google spreadsheets. Prediction +/- 5% of actual price gives 3 points, 10% – 2 points, 15% – 1 point, less than 1% is 5 points. At the end of the month 50% highest score owners goes in the next round (month). Top 10 receives a traders rank with 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 points system.
Something like that would be fine, but I don't want to run any manual competitions. If someone wants to do that, you'd just have to create an unchanging URL from which the forum can automatically import scores.