Patent ID: 8271310

Claim:
A computer-implemented system that characterizes an item involved in a consumer transaction as a virtual financial instrument, comprising: an acquisition component that obtains transaction data related to an item involved in a consumer transaction, and further obtains trend data associated with the item; a valuation component that assigns a virtual price to the item, the virtual price is a function of the trend data; a broker component that issues a virtual share of the item at the virtual price to an account associated with a consumer involved in the transaction, wherein the broker component defines the virtual share as either a virtual buy or a virtual short based upon at least one of the transaction data or the trend data; and a portfolio component that classifies a virtual share into one or more markets and creates a virtual portfolio for each market, periodically receives virtual price updates from the valuation component to track performance of each virtual portfolio, and identifies a consumer as a trendspotter, someone whose consumer transactions have predicted items that become popular for the particular market based upon the performance.