Monday, April 21, 2014

A Beautiful Merger and Obscure Bloomberg Functions

Lifted from Victor Niederhoffer's Daily Speculations:

Nintendo + Interactive Brokers, If They Merged, from Alexander Good

 It always struck me that trading was a lot like a video game with the world's worst user interface (perhaps deliberately so according to some, who think that knowing obscure Bloomberg functions leads to job security).

With the advent of Robinhood.io and potentially commission free equity trading, one of the major hurdles to gamification is removed (i.e. you bleed to death if you don't know what you're doing).

I wonder what would happen if you hired some very strong video game developers off Bioware or Nintendo (or even outright did a merger). Then mixed it with a trading platform.

I feel like you might hit an unexpected audience in Asia - see: Activision's Starcraft had near permanent cultural impact on South Korea.

Interactive Brokers is an awesome trading platform if you know what you're doing but the UI feels like it was made in 1995. In the meanwhile Nintendo is not adapting to the times. Totally impractical and probably would happen more as a start up than M&A but just a thought that could bring speculation to the masses....MORE