The Stock Market of Things

I recently watched a interesting TED Talk by Josh Luber about the secondhand sneaker market. Mind you, I couldn't care less about sneakers, but at the very end of the video, he brings up a very interesting idea: a stock market of things. Basically, he proposes that collectible items could be traded as commodities, with all of the different options available for a stock. This would include the ability to short-sell collectibles, buy into mutual funds, and run high-speed trading algorithms on them. So, what's the point of all of this? The idea is that people with specific interests can trade capital in forms that they are more intimately familiar with, rather than forcing everyone to play the same market

Whether or not this is actually worthwhile is anyone’s guess, but it’s an interesting idea to try. The main benefit that Josh Luber was advocating was that it would allow less educated people to participate in the stock market, particularly children. On that front, I support the idea. Teaching entrepreneurial children about finance is a great idea for the future of our economy, and kids will be much more interested in the action figure market than trading shares of company stock. However, there’s really no reason to create this system with real money. If it’s a teaching tool, it would be better to simulate it with a fake credit system. If it’s meant to involve the less educated people in the financial sector, perhaps it would be better to put in the effort to teach them, and then have them involved in the regular stock market. So overall, I think it’s an interesting idea for a teaching tool, but as an actual financial market, it would probably cause a lot more problems than it would fix.