Was reading Year of the Comet where one of the shadowrunner mentions having a large share of corp stock, enough to attend a board meeting and gets some great inside information. Which made me wonder, how much do corp stocks cost? Is there an official listing somewhere in a book I likely do not have yet?

Peace now.

I don't believe there is. Corp stock would actually fluctuate so listing a price would be useful only as a starting point for your campaign. If you have Loose Alliances check the section on Broker X for ideas.

A good investment would be to buy stock in the corporation you're running for and selling after it inevitably rises.

Unless the "corp" your running for is just a Johnson posing as that corp, but really serving the interests of that other corp, who is trying to help that other corp in a joint venture...

that's why having a good decker doing research is important.

And how much do you expect corp stock to fluctuate? I mean, if it was just a destruction run, you'd expect that the only major thing that could be linked to the run would be for the victim's stock to fall, not for your stock to rise. It all depends on the type of run, I guess. And if you're stealing a prototype, I don't think it would affect the stock's price for another month, and that's assuming the corp you stole it from doesn't get it to market first anyway.

Heh. Brokerage X is a ripoff. There has got to be a million groups that does exactly the same thing without the f-ing 'tude that you should be so lucky to get them to take you on as a client. Take the syndicates, for example: All of them, but especially the Triads (counterfeiting and money-laundering), Mafia (for all around major connections) and Vory (who make the Mafia boiler rooms and stock manips and fraud look like child's play). But noooo.. All LA is going to give you is a bunch of pretentious a-holes when everyone and their cousin can do what they do. Yeah, great service there.

My former fed-turned street sam-turned drone rigger/decker retired to do this stuff for a living for people he knows because it's so stupidly easy to do in SR.

There are rules for the fluctuation of corp values in the Game Information of Corporate Download. Assign an arbitrary value (using a stock like Google or something else that trades for a couple hudred a share as a baseline) and then use those rules as a multiplier or something.

Creativity. The first and last refuge of a GM.

I dunno, we were looking at this with the advent of Neonet, selling at $20 a share, and that being perhaps optimistic. Microsoft is more in that range, and Google, last I check, was around $300/share, which didn't really seem to reflect what was listed in the source books. S-K I can understand, or Novatech, because they're privately traded. But the other AAA"s shouldn't be that high IMO.

Google's worth $433/share, Apple's worth about $74, and MS is worth about $24 per share. A stock price eqv. to Berkshire Hathaway's actually seems more like a good start corps which are as large, with as much worth, and with as little actual trading done on their stock on a daily basis as the megas are IMO.

One can image runs affecting the stock price of companies that are part of a megacorporations' holdings, but short of an RA:S-style event, it's hard to imagine affecting the share price of a AAA by more than a few 0.01 yen. Then again, a major run against an A or sub-A rated corp could net a runner a lot of cash, supposing he has the foresight to sell his victim short.

Hrmm, first off Id just like to say thank you all for the replies so far Im curious though what your ideas are on how many stocks it would take before you become a corp "player" or a member of the board? Have any of you done anything with corporations like this, where in time, your characters become the very thing theyre supposed to be struggling against?

When I was re-reading aspects of Dunkelzahn's Secrets, where he was giving away seats on the board of various corps, corp shares by the bundle, it got me thinking about how we are supposed to play these things out. GM-fiat? Im naturally not looking for rules to the lvl of shareholders 101, but some basic guidelines would be very helpful for those of us who never took any business classes in college

Peace.

Really, i wouldnt put too much thought into how many shares you need. Your best bet if you're really determined to getyour self a seat, is to find out who the shareholders are, and find out how much (as a percentage) the lowest person has. I think it would be a safe assumption to say that the "owner", wether it be a group or an indivudual, has atleast 40-50%+ of the stock. So that leaves, atbest, 60% of the stock for the rest of the board (say it's an 8 man board, so thats 7 more people) who have an average of 8% stock in the company, leaving a total 6% of the stock for the IPO.

Your runner would have to be able to accquire all of that 6% and "convince" one of the shareholders to..dispose of what that have, atleast partially.

If you get data that a A corp is about to make a big unveiling of something HUGE that's going to cause stock to jump, maybe a run before the announcement would be a good thing. Go in, plant some rumor(with evidnece) of bankruptcy, let the stock plummet, buy it cheap as hell, make the evidence evaporate, then sell the stock you picked up cheap after they rebound and make their announcement. Profitable? Yes. Feasible? You tell me. I never played with stock.

As good as the completely random system is, it would be more fun to associate each corporation with how well a specific PC performed on certain tests. A rational association might be Ares stock improves as the gunbunny rolls above average expectations for his skill and decreases when he rolls below average. However, it'll be really fun to see if any PCs make the connection that SK stock is directly influenced by the rigger's success while defaulting to charisma for social tests.

Remember, corporations are bound to give you a rather large amount of information as well as a vote in certain major decisions just for owning one share of stock. Of course, your one vote means diddly squat next to Mr. Chairman of the Board who has hundreds of thousands of votes, but the related information is still useful.

When my character was investing in corps we didn’t worry about price per share, we just listed the value of the investment and every month the GM told us how much it moved. The rules in the books for stock price movements are too easy to abuse and tend to come up with reniculus values within a year (ether far to high or far to low on at least one corp. enough to suggest a major change in corporate power).

If you want to make money of a shadow run the easiest way is to find out who you will hurt not (the megacorp but the smallest traded subsidiary) and sell short. This is where you agree to sell stock at a fixed price at a point in the future.

Lets say I am hired to destroy a mining equipment factory, the target is a subsidiary of Aries mining but they only own 75%, the remaining stock is publicly traded. My Johnson said he was Hans brachoust (if memory serves that is the SK standard Johnson name) so I could buy stock in SK mining operations but what if the Johnson is actually from aztechnolagy and has another operation rigged against SK, I would loose a lot of money. Instead I agree to sell stock I don’t have in the Aries subsidiary some time after the run for close to the current market rate after I blow up there primary production facility, now the target corporation s stock drops sharply in value because they cannot make anything to sell and cant meat there contractual obligations, when I juge there stock is at its lowest I buy the number of shares I agree to sell for next to nothing and the pore sap that that made the deal with me before has to pay me what they where worth before the attack, so I clean up regardless of who ordered the attack or why.

Trying to take control of any but the smallest subsidiary would not usually be possible for a shadow runner. I would say once you start moving toward taking control of a corp you stop being a runner and become an NPC. Likely you will hire your old team mates for runes you need done to help you one your way but you don’t have time to do it yourself anymore.

If your buying stock to get the information there is no difference in your official info bundle between one share and you only just missed out one a seat on the bord, I wouldn’t even allow a PC to have enough to get the unofficial bundles from major shareholders trying to secure there votes before saying “your not a PC any more”.

Edward

You should change your handle to "The Chromed Accounant."

One more thing to remember here. Make sure your fake ID is good, trading stocks requires a valid SIN and any legitimate brokerage house is going to make a thorough check of your ID and credit worthiness.

*notes the lack of people coming to the defense of Brokerage X*

SL James

Well, I think they are ok, but nothing realy new, so in that point your right IMO. The problem with Brokerage X as well as other criminal organisations is, that a runner is usualy supposed to keep his mouth shut about any future, ongoing and even past operation (Mr. Jhonson will probably do a bit of trading, too, and won´t be happy about to much competition), so you realy have to trust your partners, otherwise, I think, your Rep will be flushed down the tube real fast.

BTW, it´s probably hard-to-impossible to become a board mamber, but you can become a bored mamber pretty fast Uhm, dumb pun, ignore this please

What's Brokerage X?

From a cynical metagame perspective Brokerage X is a prepackaged solution for the GM to handle players wanting their PCs to benefit on stock deals using inside information. The GM doesn't need to worry about fleshing out details for brokers, money laundering, fake SINs and such. In short it helps keep the game from sliding closer to Shadowaccounting than Shadowrun.

But if you like dealing with the details of money laundering or the GM would like to exploit the run potential of exploring that aspect of the criminal world, and it is there if you want it, then Brokerage X isn't for you.

Good point. I'm one of the latter. I loved doing research on money laundering. It is cool shit to read about and play out in SR. But if one doesn't, then BX or something like it (i.e., something less expensive and less über) is useful but kind of, well, simple.

As someone mentioned, you only need to own a single share to get the corporate information and be able to attend stockholder meetings. To be a corporate officer or to be on the board of directors does not ordinarily require any form of stock ownership. (It may if the bylaws make it a requirement.) The board of directors is elected by the shareholders. So when Dunkie was handing out board seats and stock, it was the stock that allowed them to be voted to the board.

Someone else also pointed out that the price of a share of stock is not the indicator of the companies value or market capitalization. Berkshire Hathaway is tens of thousands of dollars a sheare because it has seldom if ever split its stock. In a simple stock split the company announces every share will be counted as 2 shares and the price usually drops by 50%, keeping the market capitalization about what it was. Why would a company do this? To keep the stock price trading in a certain monetary range, maybe one the corp thinks is affordable or that the industry they are in trades at. (If their company is worth 10 times their competitors and the stock is trading at 1000/share, their competitor is probably trading at 100/share. They are seeking the same market dollars, but it looks like their stock is out of the price range for some investors. Throw in that stock is usually traded in blocks, like a hundred or 500 shares at a time, and those concerns multiply. So the high price stock does a 10 for 1 split and now costs around 100/share.)

Something no one mentioned concerning investing in a corporation when they anticipate a price move based on their actions is investing in options instead of the stock. Options would allow for a greater potential price increase and would provide better leverage on the investment by costing a fraction of the cost of buying or shorting the stock. (And I am going to assume any traded megacorp has an active options market.) As a GM, I would set the price of the option at 10% the price of the stock. So the PC could buy 10 times as many options as shares. If the price of the stock moves 1%, the price of the option is going to move about 10%. The magnified return is another reason investing in options for these anticipated movements is preferable.

Why does it work that way? Say a stock is selling at 100 and the option to buy that stock in the next month for 91 is 10, the 1 difference is the value of the time and risk. The next day the stock price moves to 101, the value of the option shoud be about 11 (it may have lost a little because it is a day later and thus a day closer to expiring), the 10 difference in price plus the 1 for time and risk. If the GM wants to curb the return a bit he can have the 'time and risk' portion of the option price be a larger percentage of the option price. Instead of the 1 in the example it could be 5, representing the volatility of the stock, or how easily its price fluctuates. Remember too, the option does not have to be exercised, it can be sold for its current market value.

[Sorry to go on about options, but if you are holding a position anticipating short term movement, options are the way to go. If the stock I made a bundle off of had an option market, I would be a richer man.]