Nearly a month ago, Mike Roberts gave internet viewers of his Twitch channel total control over a $50,000 stock portfolio he funded.

Twitch is a live streaming video platform primarily used to stream video game play. It was acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014.



The engineer, who works for Amazon, named his trading channel StockStream. He headlined the channel as the "Worlds first cooperative multiplayer stock market game using real money." Viewers can vote on trades every five minutes, which are then executed at brokerage firm Robinhood through custom-made software Roberts designed.



"I'm not that insane. It's just sort of an experiment," Roberts said on CNBC's "Power Lunch" Thursday. "I just found nobody has ever done something like this before. I kind of wanted to be the first person to do it … I plan on just leaving it forever, building it up, adding more features."



As of midday Thursday, his trading Twitch channel showed a $50,220 account balance with nearly 600,000 page-views. Its 0.4 percent return slightly outperformed the 0.2 percent rise in the S&P 500 since its launch on May 30.



"With StockStream and the buzz that ensued, one thing is certain: active investing is far from over. StockStream is made possible, in large part, due to Robinhood's commission-free investment platform and it's nice to see Robinhood investors use the platform in creative ways," Jack Randall, head of communications at Robinhood told CNBC.

— CNBC's Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.