Is it possible to have a functional stock market???

[caballero]

And get the second coming of poker throwaway characters? No thanks. 

[jcat]

15 hours ago, Darex567 said:

Good Morning my fellow internet roleplayers, 

 

I have been asking myself several questions in regards to this community and I thought, why isn't there (to my knowledge) a stock market? I mean, what could go wrong? 

 

If you guys have any ideas about this, it would be appreciated and I'm looking for an answer from the admins too!

 

My questions is why?  What kind of rp are you looking for with a stock exchange?

[Entity]

11 hours ago, shaobadman said:

so hypothetically if share trading was added, by default prices could jump around randomly to get the ball rolling, but then be further affected at a consistent rate by player input just as it works in reality (more buyers make the prices rise, more sellers make them drop)

That could work, but that wouldn't be a stock exchange. It would literally just be a betting site.

[Petey]

Don't.

[Jester]

Right I will say it would be cool, but I would strongly say no to it.  We don't have the attention nor the people who would care for it. 

[mj2002]

Stock markets will not happen because of the following issues.

There are a few variations of this, each with their own game breaking problems.

 

Stock markets based on IG events

This is the worst suggestion type of all. GTAW is a small environment and having stocks change in value based on actual trades is not feasible since the traded volume and frequency are too low. This makes it not only unengaging but it also means there isn't so much an issue to manipulate something, as there is not even enough to manipulate to begin with.

 

Additional problems are that a significant amount of time and/or money  has to be invested into getting this set up as a platform to begin with. Whilst more depth and interesting mechanics in financial draws more crowds, this is not balanced relative to other development needs for GTAW.

 

Stock markets based on real life

This is the closest you'll get to an interesting experience, as you are outsourcing the unpredictability of a stock market to the real world. With a proper set up, you essentially get to play rich private investor with GTAW money and real life markets. This sounds fun, but there are significant problems.

 

With outside markets comes outside money. This has to be generated from nowhere (and also removed if your character loses money) and there is no good alternative I can think of. This creates a significant risk that additional money will flow into the economy, through a mechanism and a set of probabilities we have almost no control over.

 

A platform still has to be set up in order to facilitate transactions and provide for a link between player input and real stock market trends. This is also the weak link in the concept. The internet has many tools at its disposal to keep track of the stock markets. Anything available that outpaces or provides a quicker response time than a linked GTAW trading platform gives an advantage to players who are smart enough. Now, this is not entirely unrealistic, but it means that with the right set up, you can be faster than the platform and therefor always outperform the system. For this reason alone, a system like this is disqualified.

 

Stock markets based on random values

Taking the two concepts above, you can remove two concerns by randomising market trends, the manipulation concern, and the stability and outperforming  the platform-concern.

 

However, you also remove the advantage of the real-life variation, which is the depth of real life markets. This is a big loss for this concept and removes much of the interest. You also do not solve the problem of money being added and subtracted from the economy, though the problem is significantly smaller here, since random values aren't likely to give unbalanced results.

 

It becomes gambling on random chance, which is not really all that engaging. It also still requires development time, which isn't very appealing if all you're creating is another way for players to gamble but with even less interaction than actual gambling.

 

 

 

The above is why stock markets won't happen. We're always ready to hear suggestions, but keep the above in mind.

Edited June 14, 2021 by mj2002

[Wuhtah]

Going to L&A since this hasn't been active in awhile - Please PM me if you would like this back.