I recently launched a stock market game (http://linkdaq.net) based on the top 50,000 sites ordered by the amount of links, it works reasonably well but I'm not 100% happy with the maths behind it.
Let me first be upfront and say I've no experience in the stock market, this was just a little weekend project that has taken a life of it own.
Each morning I get a list of sites, what rank they are (1-50000) the amount of links they have today and the amount of links they had yesterday.
I currently use this as my formula
(((50000 - rank ) + number_of_links) * 0.0010)
This gives me a dollar amount that is reasonable
I also work under the assumption that a site will gain 0.03% of its links per day, if it does more than this, it gets a daily bonus of 0.05% if it does less it loses 0.05% due to lack of growth.
So my question is two fold really,
1) How should I go about improving this, all the current stock market formulas I've found are based on the number of people investing in a stock and I'm not ready to use that model yet. 2) My next task is to add other elements such as twitter shares and facebook likes but I'm a little uneasy about giving them a dollar value the difference is just massive 999736 vs 4 for some urls, do you have any reading suggestions on how I can combat this?
Thanks a lot