TOP DRAW: Sachin Tendulkar during a training session in Montego Bay on Sunday. (AFP)

Ahmedabad, March 6: Every time Sachin Tendulkar hits a half-century in the World Cup — or gets out for a duck — thousands will be anxiously counting how much they stand to win or lose.

And it has nothing to do with bookies.

It was just a matter of time that the world of cricket, flush with money, went corporate. So it should come as no surprise that students of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, have opened a cricket stock exchange.

This virtual bourse, launched on www.cricstock.com, allows you to buy and trade in shares of international cricketers. The fluctuation in share prices reflects the players’ recent performance and how fans feel about them.

“The idea is to capture the mood and sentiments of cricket fans and translate them into numbers that will be reflected in the stock prices,” said Rahul Roushan, a final-year MBA student at IIM Ahmedabad and one of the developers of the website.

The site has issued an IPO (initial public offering) on all the international cricketers of Test-playing countries.

An investor is allowed to spend up to one million units of virtual cash to buy shares — of any number of cricketers — after he registers with the website. The share prices, of course, differ, with Tendulkar’s shares obviously costing more than Robin Uthappa’s.

The site has attracted over 2,000 people since the February 25 launch, and the number is growing fast. People have registered from across India and cities in Pakistan, England, Australia and the US.

The latest IPO trends show that Tendulkar has been oversubscribed 4.5 times, followed closely by Sourav Ganguly. Overall, nearly 25 players are oversubscribed from among the 150 cricketers from the Test-playing nations at the Cup. The IPO closes on March 8.

“The shares would be allocated to bidders immediately after the opening ceremony of the World Cup (on March 11). The rest of the site will also be launched then, which will include trading features, discussion forums, news, profiles of cricketers, etc,” said Karthik Laxman, another final-year student of the B-school.

“You will get dividends based upon how your cricketers perform. And you can make a profit by selling shares of high-performing cricketers.”

The dividends and profits — like the money used in buying or selling shares — are virtual, though. It’s a game you play for fun, said Karthik. “It’s a fun way to learn how a stock exchange functions.”