Hi, I'm relatively new to shadowrun. I was wondering, how would a person go around buying stock? I haven't been able to find it anywhere in any of the SR4 books. Might anyone be able to help out with this? Or atleast point me in the right direction?

I would imagine it would work the same way it does in the real world. Contact a broker. You would probably need the SINNER negative quality to do so. Taxes and such are a drag.

I guess the question is more of how to work out the availibility and prices.

Unwired has rules for Escrow services and credit accounts. They tend to be 4-8R in availability. Stocks might be similar.

I imagine the 'R' is to reflect the need for a legitamite SIN. Not using your real SIN would be fraud.

While it is certainly possible to buy and hold stock in the Shadowrun world, I would rather you consult your GM before talking to your broker about purchasing fictional stock in the Grim, Dark Future.

The reason I say this is because it shifts the focus of the game, at times, to an economic simulator with far too few data points. Tell a player he has stock in a corporation and he will bug you incessantly about how much his stock is worth and ways to raise the price so he can get more money. This isn't to say that it's bad to have stock, but I've found that the shareholder perks one receives are often ignored in favor of "DID MY SHARE PRICE GO UP HUH DID IT DID IT DID IT?"

No, I've never seen this before. Not ever. No sir. Nuh uh. >.>


It's an unspoken assumption, however, that when one buys a Lifestyle that they have bought stocks, bonds, invested in precious metals and other things and all such things are covering the lifestyle costs after that initial investment - indeed, one can assume that much of the sunk cost goes to such things!

System Failure goes into a bit of detail about IPOs and what-not.
In terms of your character or your player buying stock, just treat it as a place to store and launder nuyen. Advanced Keynesian economic theorem as calculated by the super computational power of the Matrix means that your average Shadowrunner has about as much chance of scoring big off the stock market as winning the lotto. Even Paul Krugman can't keep up with the computers of 2011, much less 2072.

Even if you could roll X + Y [threshold Z] to get N amount of nuyen, it would more than likely create a distraction from the game of distopian murder and thievery Shadowrun thrives on.

If you want to use stock trading and exchange as a plot device, I think System Failure and a healthy dose of the film Wall Street will give you a good idea of what the Sixth World stock market has in store. Make up your own rules as to how the market works to help your story along. Real stock brokers do it every day.

If your players are keen on investing in Renraku stock, or what have you, to up their own nuyen, just tell them what most brokers tell the average investor today: that results take years, investing is a long term strategy and that the next bull market is right around the corner.


Also, read more Paul Krugman and Oliver Stone is a crazy person.

Loose Alliances had rules for working with a shadow brokerage, but it's a 3rd ed books.

Thanks for a ll the help guys, I'll look into the books you mentioned.

I'd hasten to note that large stock purchases before something happened to a company is something that is investigated.

If you "Go Short" in a large degree on a Corporation you just pulled a Shadowrun in and forced it's shares down, thus earning a profit (Don't ask me how this works, I failed Accounting.), well, if you're the only one that did that recently, you're going to be a suspect.

I'd suggest a bullet-proof SIN that does things like this on a regular basis, and have a good cover story like, "Well, I saw them do it on Karl Kombatmage all the time, so I buy short all the time on companies I think are going to be hit because of what's reported in the news and what's happening on the Shadowblogs and..."

It's not insider trading when you really are doing your research and can show your work.

Another thing that can be done on the down-low is buying up Corporate Script, whose value is also based on the Corporate Holdings. There's a black market for them, and you can do pretty decently on that if you know some really hinky drek is going down. With the exception of Aztechnology, as it's illegal for Non-Azzie and Non-Aztlaners to own Aztlan Pesos/Aztechnology Script.

Anyhow, when has AZT ever had to deal with backblows of it's doings? They just release a new product and their advertisements drown out the bad publicity.

One problem with a megacorp is that it's so large that the only way the stock price is going to drop noticably is if the Court nukes it from orbit.

(Also, going short means you're borrowing something to sell at current market with the promise that you're going to replace that thing later, preferably if the market is down. Example:

You take a short position on Aztechnology stock, currently at 65 a share, borrowing 10,000 shares to sell.

Your broker is going to want those shares back. You want Aztechnology stock to tank, so when you buy back shares you want it as far under 65 a share as possible.

Sooo, you'd want to sell short, take the run, make the stock tank, then buy back the shares. Your broker might issue a margin call in the meantime (a down payment to show good faith) so have a few extra bucks handy for that.)

Shorting is where you sell something you borrowed with later intents to buy back that exact same item to return back to the lender.

I don't fully understand how it works with stocks, but from what I understand it could work something like the below.

The runner received a job against Renraku.
The runner borrows 10,000 shares of Renraku stock that are valued at 10,000 apiece.
The runner sells those 10,000 shares for a total of 100,000,000 .
The runner conducts his run, causing Renraku share price to drop to 9,000 apiece.
The runner buys back 10,000 shares for 90,000,000 leaving him with 10,000,000 .

Pretty much that way for stocks. The runner doesn't get the cash until after the short position is closed.

I kinda imagine that a number of savvy runners would use their inside information to make some nice money on the market. On the flip side I can see corps using statistical analysis of stock prices and buy/sell orders in order to predict runs, where those runs might hit, and which corp may have contracted them.

Thus, since there's no real way to predict what would happen, I just assume that runners using the market are doing so as a place to store in a legit location.

Megacorps are simply too big and too entrenched to have their stock prices fluctuate wildly based on the public results of a Shadowrun.

Megacorps are also a bit too savvy to say they've been hit as well - and 'runners don't like their work to be discovered for several days after the fact.

There's also the distinct possibility that the megacorps - which don't have a lot of banking and financial instruments - took steps to bar short selling under an 'uptick' rule as short sales can artificially drive a price down as investor confidence wanes. It's like making a 'run on the bank' - enough of a rumor that a bank is failing will cause everyone to pull their cash from it, thereby causing the bank to fail.

I gave stock as a reward in my game. I just gave a flat amount though, example; $1,000,000 in monobe stocks. now how many individual stock certificates equal $1,000,000 I have no clue, for simplicities sake I don't care. If any of my players wanted to sell any of the stock I just give them the amount in nuyen and be done with it. Example: player, " hey I have 50,000 nuyen in Ares stock can i sell 20% of that for cash?" GM, " not a problem here's your 10,000 nuyen, happy day chummer" . Now if you wanna sell it through a brokerage house, go ahead and charge like a 5% surcharge or whatever E-trade charges to make it fair, up to you and your GM to decide. I do agree though Runner's actions should never influence stock prices, opens a can of worms. Just take the stock and smile at another successful run accomplished.

I'm wondering if there's much in the way of "manual" stock purchasing at all by the 2070s.

Already in real life high-frequency trading groups make of a HUGE percentage of the daily stock trading volume. They trade on the order of thousands of transactions a second, all controlled by computers running massively complex prediction algorithms. Any time a stock is higher or lower than the predicted amount, even by a tiny fraction of a point, they buy and sell. There's almost no human interaction in the process at all, except to monitor the system for problems.

There's a company out there that is spending 30 million dollars on a dedicated custom fiber-optic data connection. Because it will shave THREE MILLISECONDS off their network lag time, thus giving them an edge over their rival companies. Other companies are designing their own custom chips and computers, because nothing out there on the market can keep up with their demands.

The Nanosecond Buyout is closer than you think.




-k

The Nanosecond Buyout is already here - those systems were responsible for a minor stock crash last year when a hiccup in a stock price precipitated a massive selloff of a company and bombed the Dow by a few hundred points in the span of minutes.

It was a trip to watch. If you've got the money to get into it, these microsecond transactions are starting to net people a lot of money.