[AP] Wow, the stock exchange is totally broken.

[Pruvmerong]

So I began my Humble Merchant start today. Spent a few hours trading, upgrading my hauler, and exploring a bit. I was up to around 400k credits and decided to give this stock exchange thing a try. Twenty minutes later I was up to 7.5mil credits (and the first 5-10mins were spent just learning how to use the exchange). The stock exchange makes other traditional money making methods (sans end-game stuff) seem like a waste of time.

Is it working as intended, or is it as unbalanced as it seems?

[Gothsheep]

I don't even really get the stock exchange. Is there some trick to it, or is it as simple as 'buy low, wait a while, sell high'?

[Pruvmerong]

I don't even really get the stock exchange. Is there some trick to it, or is it as simple as 'buy low, wait a while, sell high'?

That's pretty much what I did. It seems best to buy from the "Natural" category, as they seem to fluctuate way more. There were 3 main shares I was using. I'd buy when they were in the upper 90's, then SETA and wait until the index drops and sell.

[kylania]

I just turned 400,000cr into 2.2m cr in 30 minutes. Seems broken maybe? All I had to do was pay 10,000 to wait to make millions.

[Playbahnosh]

Since there are no laws on stock trading in the X-verse (as of yet), you can get disgustingly rich with "insider trading", look it up.

[argon_emperor]

Tip:

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Go to PTNI Headquarters, get the Stock Exchange there opened up, buy all the shares you can for Sunrise Flowers (when they're at 5cr), then buy the flowers like crazy to drop the index, therefore increasing the price of the shares, then sell both the shares and the flowers. Going from index of 100, to only about 60 I think it was, I made a profit of 2.2 mil. And then there's more profit from selling the flowers to the Sun Oil Refineries as well.

[Playbahnosh]

Tip:

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Go to PTNI Headquarters, get the Stock Exchange there opened up, buy all the shares you can for Sunrise Flowers (when they're at 5cr), then buy the flowers like crazy to drop the index, therefore increasing the price of the shares, then sell both the shares and the flowers. Going from index of 100, to only about 60 I think it was, I made a profit of 2.2 mil. And then there's more profit from selling the flowers to the Sun Oil Refineries as well.

OR you could...

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...do the same thing with Nividium and get 10x the money.

Thats insider trading, btw.

[Pruvmerong]

Even without the "insider trading" exploit, the exchange is still disgustingly profitable. There's virtually no risk in in the local exchange if you do it right (haven't tried the corporate exchange).

Though, off the top of my head, I can't think of any way to "fix" it. Maybe if the index updated at 10x longer intervals or something, it would be more balanced. As it is now, you can just SETA and wait a minute or two until the index is where you want it to be.

[Playbahnosh]

Heh, real stock exchange has insider trading, X-verse stock exchange has in-SETA trading

[Olterin]

It's worse still ...

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Provided your rep with the Yaki is enough to enter Senator's Badlands...

Step 1: acquire a TM, a Falcon Hauler, 40 Sidearms, some spacefuel (the latter to gain access to the Yaki stock exchange) and a seed capital of about 1 million credits (this will however work even if you only have literally 10k credits and the above prereqs)
Step 2: fly to Senator's Badlands, dock at the Yaki stock exchange to unlock it
Step 3: load the 40 Sidearms into the TM cargo
Step 4: buy up all the cheap Sidearms shares
Step 5: unload the 40 Sidearms into the Falcon hauler
Step 6: sell the now hideously expensive Sidearms shares

Repeat 3-6 until you have more money than you ever wished for (or your keyboard/mouse gives up ) or up to a point you deem it too exploitey.
Profit per repeat: 500k

I'm sure the above principle can be (ab)used with other goods too, just have to find them - and I'm not sure whether they'd be more profitable.

[Gothsheep]

My attempts to use the stock market were...less than profitable. I bought natural stocks that were low, and they...stayed low. And stayed low. And staaaaaaaaaayed low.

One particular stock I bought at 21 (the minimum) and had a max of 80. After about a half-hour (in 10X SETA) I finally considered myself lucky to sell it off at 30.

[wRAR]

Without insider trading (which looks like an exploit to me) I couldn't do more than 400k in one transaction and it is not possible to do that continuously, so I view the stock exchange as a nice addition to other money making ways (one taxi mission with several passengers gives several million, though you need to look for them).

[argon_emperor]

"Insider trading" is hardly an exploit. When you think about it, the entire basis of any kind of stock market is something that is in high demand will have more valuable shares, while those which have greater supply than demand will be less valuable. Therefore, by using up the supply, and making the production facilities work harder, you're generating need for the product. And while you may think that it's 'insider' because you're the one doing it, just remind yourself that anyone can, and will be doing it too. Which is the whole reason why share prices in the game fluctuate without player input in the first place.

[LV]

The exploit can be fixed by checking what the player has on his ships when a trade is made, it can even check for dropped crates to stop that exploit as well so the "now you see them now you don't" trick is gone, it could even make the wares disappear although a mixture of this and longer time between buy/sell would also work

No idea if that will find it's way into a patch in that way or not but i'd expect something to happen.



For purists with no willpower don't use it (if that's possible)

For exploiters with no morals i'd make the most of it.

[wRAR]

For purists with no willpower don't use it (if that's possible)

For exploiters with no morals i'd make the most of it.

Right, it is completely optional so I could just ignore it (but then I'd need to spend another hour to get that remaining money for Skiron!). But it is always not nice to see other people get lots of money when you get much less

[LV]

It's up to you if you want to eat from the Tree of Life, you know the consequence

It's not game breaking but it's certainly game changing. Depends on what level you like to play at.

If you want the full feeling of accomplishment then you don't eat, if you want a skiron [teldadi voice for full effect] eatsss my friendsss, eatssss

[gbjbaanb]

So the fixes are simple.

first problem, if you buy at index 100, the price of the shares are always at the lowest end of trading. Obviously @index 100, the share price should be in the middle of the range. (and what's this thing about ranges, share prices in a liquid market can go crazy up or down)

second problem, if you flood the market the share price will respond immediately, and heavily. Which is a bit silly if you think that a single transport ship can influence an entire planetary economy. A TL just isn't that big, so you have to assume that the station supply of goods are representative and not the actual values - and make the share price for commodities move a lot slower when the player 'interferes' with the supply of goods.

Another way to fix the stock market manipulation is to vary the price if the player buys or sells a lot of shares - in today's world, if Warren buffet decided to sell a billion dollars worth of Microsoft shares, he wouldn't be able to do it - the market makers couldn't take that much stock off him, or would give him a very low price for them all. (ie he wouldn't be able to sell at the 'market price'), so just put a limit to the number of shares you can buy or sell at any given time, the player will have to sell and sell and sell to get rid of his large investment, each time getting a lower price for each tranche.

I'm more concerned about the recording of shares - has anyone else noticed that their trading history report is completely wrong?

[Promethium]

I don't see how you guys are making so much easy money with this.

I was in Nyana's Hideout, and they have the only Space Fuel Distillery in that area of space, so I bought all the stocks, bought all the space fuel, and then dumped it in space and sold.

I was hardly making any money though, sometimes I was still losing a couple hundred credits from the 2% charge.

[A5PECT]

I don't think it's broken. I think it's incomplete.

It needs a way to detect and punish players for insider trading perhaps leaving a random chance to get away with it, and an actual element of risk in investing. Right now companies never go bankrupt (the Commonwealth governments must do some serious subsidizing), so there's nothing stopping the player from holding onto stocks indefinitely.

[SepticTooth]

I don't think it's broken. I think it's incomplete.

It needs a way to detect and punish players for insider trading perhaps leaving a random chance to get away with it, and an actual element of risk in investing. Right now companies never go bankrupt (the Commonwealth governments must do some serious subsidizing), so there's nothing stopping the player from holding onto stocks indefinitely.

Pretty much agree, the only risks to the stock exchange are usually a loss of up to a max of 400k - 500k credits if you get impatient with a stock sitting at 99 and just want your credits back.

Unless you actually try to risk your money by investing in anything below a buying index of 90. Meanwhile you can make 1mill+ credits profit for just a 10-15 index decline and on 10x Seta that can sometimes take only a couple minutes.

The result is pretty much a no risk steady profit that out paces most early game ventures like traders, missions and early factories/complexes.