Stock Market

The **Stock Market** is a sub-Location that is only accessible from the Bank. Here you can view the price of different Stocks, and buy and sell those stocks for (hopefully) profit.

The price of different Stocks is affected to some extent by the Economy, but is not directly clamped to it like Item Prices, Wages, or Rent prices. Instead, Stocks will *trend* towards the Economic Index, but fluctuate around it.

There is no way to view exact Stock prices except visiting the Bank, and a visit to the "Broker" takes even more time, so trading Stocks each week costs time. However, properly trading Stocks can double or triple a player's Wealth (or more!) within a very short timeframe, if they're lucky.

Investing in T-Bill Stocks is the safest way to store money, since they cannot be robbed by Wild Willy (unlike Cash), cannot be wiped out by a Market Crash (unlike Bank Deposits), and always count towards the player's Liquid Assets (unlike Durables). Unlike other Stocks, T-Bill stocks also never fluctuate in price. However, there is a 3% fee for selling T-Bill stocks.

Reading the Newspaper carefully each Week was supposed to reveal particularly good or bad Stocks without having to visit the Bank, but this feature is bugged and does not work in any official version of the game.

## Accessing the Stock Market

To access the **Stock Market**, visit the Bank. The last option, "See the Broker", will take you to the Stock Market menu.

Accessing the Stock Market requires you to have at least 1 Hour remaining on the clock. The action advances time by 2 Hours. However, buying and selling Stocks themselves does not take any additional time, nor does exiting the Stock Market menu.

## Buying and Selling Stocks

In the **Stock Market** menu, each of the 6 Stocks is listed next to its current price per unit, and the total value of the stocks you own of that particular type (initially $0 for all stocks).

To purchase a particular Stock, select the name of the Stock on the left, and then click the "Buy" button at the bottom. This will buy one stock of the selected type for the listed price. You may click the "buy" button repeatedly to buy more stocks, as long as you have the Cash to do so.

Selling Stocks works the same. Select the stock you wish to sell, and click the "Sell" button to sell one unit of that stock for the listed price. The money is placed directly in your wallet. You may repeatedly click the button to sell stocks until you have no more stocks of that type.

The "Done" button returns you to the main Bank menu.

## Stock Prices

The prices of **Stocks** fluctuate every single Turn. Unlike the prices of Items in shops, Stock prices are not clamped to each other. One stock may become more expensive, while another becomes cheaper.

Nevertheless, Stock prices do react to the Economy in a broad sense, having a better chance to go up (and to go up more sharply) if the Economy is high, or a better chance to go down (and to go down more sharply) when the Economy is low. Events like an Economic Boom or Market Crash increase those chances even more on the turn when they occur.

Each stock has a Base Price which indicates its "neutral" state. The price of a stock can normally fluctuate between 50% and 250% of its Base Price.

**NOTE:** The actual formula calculating the price of stocks at the start of the turn is quite complicated, and will not be described here for simplicity's sake. Essentially, the game runs a complex function to set the main Economic Index, then runs it again to get the general trend of the Stock Market, and then finally runs the function 6 more times - one for each individual stock. The result is then applied as a percentage to the Base Price of each stock to get their final price. Running three iterations of the same complex formula per stock is what makes Stocks so volatile compared to the rest of the economy, and is the reason why explaining Stock Price calculations would be futile.

## Newspaper

Reading the Newspaper every Week at Black's Market was supposed to occasionally reveal hints about which Stocks are trending upwards and which are trending downwards. Unfortunately, a bug in the code of both the Floppy and CD-ROM versions of the game prevents specific Stock tips from ever appearing in the Newspaper.