How to make money using nividium and the stock exchange

|-|Mohawk|-| · Post by **|-|Mohawk|-|** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 17:45

I'm not the first person to discover this, but at the time I made the thread I couldn't find any other threads about this, ahem, financially-advantageous mining venture.

Anywho, I've discovered that you can make a lot of money in AP (and I mean a LOT) by buying and selling nividium stock. This still works after patch 2.0 (also, since there's been some confusion, this is for the nividium stock under the MINERAL section, NOT the nividium stock under the NATURALS section). Here's how:

1) Mine some nividium. You should have at least 12 units, but the more the better, as you'll soon see.

2) Fly your nividium-bearing ship to a sector with a stock exchange that has nividium stock. I use Nyana's Hideout SE and PTNI Headquarters SE (I'll explain why in a minute).

3) While your nividium is in the region for that particular stock exchange (for example, Nyana's Hideout), buy up all the available nividium stock.

4) Fly the nividium ship to a different region. It must leave the region where you bought the stock in order for this to work. If you're in Nyana's Hideout, just fly west to Scale Plate Green. Now you can sell your nividium stock at the Nyana's Hideout SE for a bundle of credits. But there's more...

5) While still in Scale Plate Green, buy nividium stock at the PTNI Headquarters SE (this assumes you have a ship docked at the PTNI HQ SE so you can buy stock remotely). Now fly back to Nyana's Hideout and sell the PTNI HQ stock, buy up the Nyana's Hideout stock, and just keep repeating until you have as many credits as you'd like.

The reason this is so profitable is because for every unit of nividium present in the region, there are two shares of nividium stock available at that region's stock exchange. (The reason you need to have at least 12 units of nividium is because the demand for nividium in both Nyana's Hideout and PTNI Headquarters is 12. To get the best possible stock buying price, you need to match supply to demand.) So if you have 12 units of nividium, you can buy 24 shares of nividium stock. However, if you have a Mammoth full of nividium, around 14,000 units or so, then you can buy 28,000 shares of nividium stock. At the price of nividium stock, that's a lot of credits!

Lastly, a plea to the Egosoft crew: I realize that this is an exploit you may want to fix (in fact, I was expecting a fix in 2.0 and was surprised that there wasn't one). However, please try to keep the stock exchange as realistic as possible. I like that the SE is affected by what actually happens in the game (i.e., supply and demand of wares). Don't change that! I know that it makes it possible for players to try and exploit the market, but even so, that's not very profitable with anything but nividium. So even if you fix the nividium exploit, keep the stock exchange dependent on the actual universe. One idea that's been discussed on this thread is limiting the max number of shares available at the market. This would reduce the profitability of the exploit, but still keep the market dependent on the universe.

Friznit · Post by **Friznit** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 17:51

The fix should be supply figures (and stock prices) changing when commodidities are actually bought and sold, not merely present in the region. Large amounts of free money makes the game dull.

|-|Mohawk|-| · Post by **|-|Mohawk|-|** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 18:03

Friznit: That's actually not a bad idea. It would make sense for 'supply' to be whatever is actually in the cargo holds of stations, not ships. How 'demand' is calculated, I'm not really sure.

And as for large amounts of free money making the game dull: first, this isn't exactly free money. It's not like scripting in credits. To take advantage of this loophole, you have to mine nividium, plus you have to have some starting capital with which to buy stock. Second, I'm relieved that in AP there is finally a way to make money quickly (the stock exchange). When I first started playing X3TC I found making money was a slow and arduous process. I don't have the time to make money in X3 the slow way, and it makes the game less enjoyable if I can't do anything because I'm too poor. If some folks feel like the SE is cheating and they don't want to use it, that's fine; they don't have to. I like it and I'm glad it's in the game.

That said, this nividium thing is a big loophole that should probably be closed somehow, just not at the expense of the stock exchange functioning properly.

wRAR · Post by **wRAR** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 18:18

Obligatory question: does this still work in 1.1?

pr0nflakes · Post by **pr0nflakes** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 18:27

Things like this are why i havent even used the stock exchange yet.
I would get half way into my game and have a nagging voice in my head saying "yeah but you used an exploit to get where you are" and i would start over.
Same happened with nividium mining in TC, it just makes things too easy and i end up feeling like ive cheated.

|-|Mohawk|-| · Post by **|-|Mohawk|-|** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 18:34

wRAR wrote:Obligatory question: does this still work in 1.1?

Yes, it works in 1.1. I said it works post-patch, but I guess I didn't specify 1.1. I'll edit that in.

Ripskar · Post by **Ripskar** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 18:37

Nobody's forcing you to use the exploits, I haven't used them but I still make use of the SX.
IIRC the exploit was 'eject the nividium' rather than jump out in 1.0 so it sounds like it was nerfed to an extent.
And if it isn't already obvious; the exploit is old news, it's even indirectly referred to in the 1.1 patch notes.

Tharrg · Post by **Tharrg** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 18:51

Yes I think there is a problem with the number of shares available. I posted in about that in http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... &start=510 but the thread seems dead.

Basically I think they should introduce competition in the sense that the number of shares available should reflect how good the investment looks to the market. Show if the investment looks bad, say index 0 or 200, then there could be the full x2 shares. If the index is at 100 the shares should all be sold out – sorry come back later. For other values some easy formula can be used to link shares available to the player to index.

A seemingly trivial to program way of simulating competition and remove some of the exploits.

|-|Mohawk|-| · Post by **|-|Mohawk|-|** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 19:55

@Ripskar: Yes, I am aware of how the exploit worked in 1.0, but I hadn't seen any threads on how it works in 1.1, hence my disclaimer that I may not be the first to discover this. Basically, the "fix" in 1.1 didn't really fix anything.

@Tharrg: Yes, the number of shares available is part of the problem. However, I don't think making it so zero shares are available when the index is 100 would be a good idea. Plus, if you are in the sector with a cargo bay full of nividium, the index is automatically going to be 200, so that wouldn't solve the problem.

Since an index of 200 means that supply is twice the demand, and since the index never goes higher than 200, no matter how much supply there is, maybe the solution is to limit the max number of shares available, like this:

number of shares available = supply*2
max number of shares available = (demand*2)*2

I'm not sure, though, if every ware has twice as many shares available as the supply, so the equation might work differently for different wares.

Falcrack · Post by **Falcrack** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 20:12

Why not just use a cheat script and give yourself billions of credits? It is a lot faster, will give you a lot more money, and is equally fun as any Nividium or stock exchange exploit.

kylania · Post by **kylania** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 20:19

Falcrack wrote:Why not just use a cheat script and give yourself billions of credits? It is a lot faster, will give you a lot more money, and is equally fun as any Nividium or stock exchange exploit.

Then you get the modified tag and can't get achievements.

Probe1 · Post by **Probe1** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 20:22

I think he already made that point clear. Unlike a cheat script this can be done in vanilla without a modified tag, which he was kindly bringing to egosofts attention..

|-|Mohawk|-| · Post by **|-|Mohawk|-|** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 22:17

I realized my formula for limiting the number of shares available didn't make any sense. I changed it so hopefully now it's clear. I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this. Would this be an acceptable solution?

Number of shares available = supply*2
Max number of shares available = (demand*2)*2

With this system, there are still twice as many shares available as there are units of nividium, but the max number of shares allowed would be twice the demand, an index of 200.

So if the demand is 12, and the supply is 12, there would be 24 available shares and the index would be 100. If the supply is 24 or greater, there would be 48 shares available and an index of 200.

Players could still exploit the market, but it would be far less profitable.

Tharrg · Post by **Tharrg** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 22:38

|-|Mohawk|-| wrote:owever, I don't think making it so zero shares are available when the index is 100 would be a good idea.

Why not?

In any real exchange everyone else is also going to know that investing at 100 is easy money. Its not difficult to see why they might be sold out at that price.

So I am suggesting shares avaliable to the player something like

Num of shares = 2 * supply * |1-index/100|

|x| is absolute value of x, ie remove sign. I am not saying this is best just simple and the right sort of idea.

Friznit wrote:The fix should be supply figures (and stock prices) changing when commodidities are actually bought and sold, not merely present in the region. Large amounts of free money makes the game dull.

I must admit that I thought supply was just supply in factory stocks

not including ships as well. There must be some reason why they included goods in ships?

|-|Mohawk|-| wrote:Plus, if you are in the sector with a cargo bay full of nividium, the index is automatically going to be 200, so that wouldn't solve the problem.

Personally I am not too bothered about complicated exploits. After all, with no insider trading laws there are lots of similar exploits on real exchanges.

Its the trivial ones that worry me.

Ripskar · Post by **Ripskar** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 22:43

In a real exchange index = 100 means everyone holding them is trying to get rid of the shares before they are worthless.
It's when Index = 1 that no shares should be available.

Eg; The biggest selling share on Hargreaves Lansdown over the past week is Tesco. That dropped from £4.10 per share at New Year to £3.10 on 12th Jan.
It's now £3.21.5, do you think there are no shares left for sale?
Link

|-|Mohawk|-| · Post by **|-|Mohawk|-|** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 23:15

I must admit that I thought supply was just supply in factory stocks not including ships as well. There must be some reason why they included goods in ships?

This was part of the "fix" in 1.1. People were transferring wares from their stations to ships so they could reduce the supply and make money on the stock market. Now the wares still count as supply even if they're in a ship. But you can still leave the region and then sell the stock. And this isn't complicated at all. Like my initial example shows, you can fly back and forth between Nyana's Hideout and Scale Plate Green, buying and selling stock and making a killing. That's why I suggested limiting the max amount of shares available.

Tharrg · Post by **Tharrg** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 23:39

Ripskar wrote:In a real exchange index = 100 means everyone holding them is trying to get rid of the shares before they are worthless.

Surely the index you are talking about here is a different one to that in the X3 stock market.

In X3 you buy shares at 100 then you can never loose more than the broker charge. Buy for less than you loose money if the index rises. If the index is more than 100, then you can always wait for the index to decrease and not risk it never going down. I see no reason why inverters in the X3 world can not work this out.

I think X3 shares are a different thing to real world shares. In X3 they are more like factory owners raising funds using there commodity stocks as collateral.

Falcrack · Post by **Falcrack** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 23:47

The stock exchange in X3 falls far, far short of an accurate depiction of a real stock exchange.

Ripskar · Post by **Ripskar** » Wed, 1. Feb 12, 23:48

No, RL Gold price is currently high due to everyone wanting to buy a commodity that is seen as safe. This would have a low index value if you used the default X3 system.
A few years ago (before the Credit Crunch) the price was low (X3 index high) because nobody wanted to buy the shares. Supply has remained essentially static.

Tharrg · Post by **Tharrg** » Thu, 2. Feb 12, 01:02

Ripskar wrote:No, RL Gold price is...

Yes whatever...

I do not see what this has to do with the fact that in X3 the best time to buy shares is when the index is at 100. Hence this is when the X3 investors will buy them. Hence there will be less shares for sale at index 100 in X3 for the player to buy than at other times.