What is this?

Every market day, two stocks get bought:

• The Mob is whichever ticker the crowd voted for the most through the website or by posting $TICKER in our Twitch chat.
• The Monkey is a ticker chosen at random from a curated pool of liquid US equities.

Both sides get the same dollar amount on the same day. We never sell. Over time, the two portfolios diverge based purely on the performance of the picks.

Can the crowd beat a dartboard? That's the whole question.

1. You vote on the homepage (or post $TICKER in chat). One vote per browser per day.
2. At 1:00 PM Eastern, voting closes. The top-voted ticker becomes the Mob's pick. Ties split the daily dollar amount evenly across the tied tickers.
3. At the same moment, a random eligible ticker is chosen for the Monkey. Same dollar amount.
4. Both orders go to a single Alpaca brokerage account as notional market orders.
5. Fills typically come in within minutes. Position values get snapshotted at end of day. The chart on the homepage tracks both portfolios over time.

• Not investment advice. Don't buy stocks because the Mob or the Monkey did.
• Not a managed fund. Site visitors don't own any shares. Only the head monkey's personal Alpaca account does.
• Not a service you pay for. Voting is free and always will be. There's an optional supporter tier (Mob Member or Mob Boss) on Buy Me a Coffee to help cover hosting, but supporters get the same vote everyone gets.
• Not a serious trading strategy. Buying stocks at random is a famously bad idea. So is buying based on internet consensus. We're literally testing how bad both ideas are at the same time.

For the first weeks, the system runs on Alpaca's paper-trading sandbox: fake money, real market data. After a clean soak period, the head monkey funds a real Alpaca account and the system starts placing actual trades there.

Trade size is intentionally small (currently $10 per side per day). This is a meme project, not a hedge fund.

Built on Next.js, Postgres, Redis, and Railway. The brokerage connection uses Alpaca's API. The Twitch chat listener uses tmi.js.