Ball Street: With stock market liquidity, TradeFan makes you an active player in Fantasy Sports

You’ve got a nice glass of Scotch and you’re settling in to watch Luka Doncic or James Harden put up 70 Fantasy points and lead your team to victory and a very nice payout.

Then two minutes into the game Doncic turns his ankle.

Your fine Scotch quickly turns to battery acid and you realize you’re toast.

Well, not anymore.

TradeFan is a Fantasy game which allows you to buy and sell your team within the game.

Canadian theoretical physicist Claude Elharrar had the original idea for what became TradeFan in 2013 and he teamed up with a friend who was a mathematician.

“The idea was to correlate athlete’s performance to a value that moves in real time according to what’s happening on the field,” Elharrar said a in recent phone interview. “In other words to create a stock market for sports.”

The team raised money in 2013, built a demo and “the demo was very successful,” Elharrar said.

“So we raised more money and adapted our game to fantasy sports, where you create a team, buy into a tournament, but have the ability trade your players. But some fantasy games are too small to have an efficient market,” Elharrar said, “so we went back to the drawing board and built a system that takes all the statistics in real time and transforms them into a value in real time. This creates liquidity in the market so you can by or sell your player at any time.

“We did another test and liquidity went up a thousand times. People were trading non-stop.”

Next came scaling the system – 17 beta tests were run over the next three-and-a-half years.

“We realized that users come to the platform really often,” Elharrar said. “The product is extremely sticky. In regular fantasy sports you build your team and go home and watch TV [or track the games online]. Here you’re constantly coming back to the platform to buy or sell.”

You can also track the players who are kicking your behind and do what they’re doing. The advantage to them? They get the first-mover advantage and your interest drives up their prices.

Today (Wednesday, Jan. 15), TradeFan unveils its newest iteration with a faster trade engine, migration of the platform to the cloud and more free tournaments.

If you like sports and enjoy Fantasy Sports and also enjoy playing the market, this may be your nirvana.

TradeFan is a Daily Fantasy platform where you can trade your players in real time. It transforms Daily Fantasy from a passive game to a truly immersive and active second-screen option for players that want to stay engaged with the in-game action through real-time trading. Injuries, low performance and inactive players are no longer factors for fantasy losses. TradeFan’s algorithm is designed to set an accurate value for the player based on their live performance, which allows the playing field to be level for both highly engaged active users and passive ones.