Dalal Street maybe experiencing a slowdown but the 'Cricket Stock Exchange' is shooting up.

The CSE is a novel concept created by the students of Indian Institue of Management-Ahmedabad and IIT-Roorkee that allows cricket-crazy fans to trade virtual stocks of their favourite players online. www.cricstock.com is a virtual stock exchange created on the internet and has been modelled on the Bombay Stock Exchange," said Rahul Roushan, a final year student of the post-graduate programme in management at IIM-A.

"It is a fun way to learn about how stock exchanges function," said Rahul who alongwith two of his IIM-A colleagues Karthik Laxman and Siddharth Murlidharan, teamed up with Mitanshu Garg, a third year student of IIT-R to set up the project. 

The idea of the project was to popularise stock exchanges through cricket which most Indians understand and at the same time create a mechanism which will reflect the feelings of cricket fans about a particular cricketer, Roushan said.

"Here we have allocated stock prices to about 150 international cricketers who feature in the 15-member World Cup squads of the Test-playing nations," he said.