You know, I don't really want to jump into the probable/plausable argument here, as interesting as it is, I just had a small thought that seems to have been over-looked in the discussion.

Art hired a boatload of financial guru's who were working independantly with their own set of funds. The guru who spills the beans somehow manages to put a few pieces together and extrapolates all the numbers (i.e. he's probably talking out of his ass with regard to them.)

He may have an idea what a few other guys were able to do, plus what he did, and figures a percentage probably didn't do so well and viola!

We all have to keep in mind that game information like this has to be taken with a grain of salt. Sure, we can trust what he says and figure Art has 10 trillion in the bank and is about to turn the lights off on Novatech. Or we can look at that Art's plan has had a string of good luck, but he's just scraping by on what he's been able to do.

I mean, if he had the resources the snitch says he has Art probably would have been more successful taking out Gunderson than he was. I've always figured that the snitch was a little generous in his estimates. That, and Art probably has all his assets tied up in things to bring down these corporations and what not. One wrong move and Art will be back in the BTL den.

More than that, if you purchase a set percent of a company, you must report it to regulator agencies- the SEC today, maybe the Corp Court in 2064 but still someone has to know. If you don't report it, well, I'm sure youn can get a bunk near Martha Stewart.

To give people an idea:

The biggest volume on a single title on New York Stock Exchange last friday was Exxon Mobil, 37 millions shares exchanged, a total worth of $2.3 trillion (of course, there are double count, a lot of those shares have been exchanged several times that day). The best differential you could do was $2.5 per share (buying at opening and selling around 14:15), a 4% gain. That was a big day since the average over the last three months was 12 millions shares exchanged each day. Exxon Mobil total market capitalization is 6,451,300,000 shares, weighting at the current value $408 trillions (institutional 52%, public 47%, insiders 1%). In other words, less than 0.5% of the existing shares were exchanged during that day.

Other stock makes a lot less, a volume between 500 and 700 billions for big names such as Citigroup, Pfizer, Wal-Mart or ChevronTexaco. Total volume (still with double counts) on NYSE was at least 6 trillions (very rough estimate). But friday might not be a good example, end of the week, all that.

(note that a 4% gain each working day, with every penny we own -I'm not saying this is possible- would turn 20 billions into 2 trillions in 6 months)

I think it's been touched on already but can't make money Via Currency Exchanges? I seem to remember in Corporate Shadowfiles that the Mega's had Departments that did just that, Borrowed Stupid amounts of money for 10 Secs did some kind of Currency Exchange, and made loads of money out of thin air. I think the book called it Arbatage or something

Arbitrage

Yeah, I mentionned it myself earlier.

You could make lots of money, not trillions. You need to be able to anticipate correctly the monetary market and bet big when you expect it to plunge or soar. As I said, fortune have been made that way, but not trillions and not every months since that kind of occasion do not come along every week.

Nath : Interesting. I didn't realize that Exxon had such a huge volume of stock flying around. As you said, doesn't make the 20 B -- 2000B translation possible in 6 month.

If corporations, banks and legal billionaire with legions of crack financial analyst (and expert financial SKs in the case of Shadowrun) can't succeed in consistently beating the market by more than a few points, I don't see how Art would do it from deep within his cave.

IMO whoever wrote the piece looked at that 4% daily return Nath pointed out, figured Art is a guru that can do this with his entire fortune because he is setting up runs to influence the market and capitalize on the changes.

Charon, I agree it is farfetched. But you keep wanting to think he is trading in one company or having one shadowrun happen at a time. What is keeping him from having thousands going at a time? You also need to get over the idea of the US economy or even the entire US stock exchange. They are Megacorps, the biggest current corporation is a trifling subsidiary in their scale of things.

Arbitrage, as I am familiar with it, involves seeing different markets where an imbalance exists and making risk free trades. Say oil is selling for $50 a barrel on the New York exchange and being bought for $50.25 on the Chicago exchange. A trader could implement an arbitrage deal with no risk by buying on one exchange and selling on the other until the imbalance corrects itself.

Art is also not bound by retaliation from an Omega order, at the moment, which is the one thing that prevents most AAA and AA megas from destroying each other outright.

He got his trillions by burning karma? That's your explanation!?

Might as well not explain it all and hope no player asks.

For me, as I said a few post earlier, I'll just cut a few zeros from Art's fortune to get it out of la-la-land and back into I-can-suspend-my-disbelief territory.

PS : I *AM* the big GM in the sky.

Not by Canon, you are not. There are 2 GMs in fact, Randall Bills and Mike Yates. And maybe the exchange rate between cash and karma are not the same for both ways. Oh, by the way, you should go read Ripley's Believe it or not more often. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

No really, I am.

I drive a flying GM car.

And as a matter of fact, I should be on Ripley's believe or not any day, now.

I'm glad you can suspend your disbelief in ultra inflated bottom lines and get back to the serious work of cyber enhanced troll shamans, firing 20mm autocannons from the back of a motorcyle.

There are ways to achieve such gains. However they are often immoral and or illegal, high risk and requiring a modicum of luck.

An example procedure would be to sell short on a valuable small corp. then hire shadow runners to destroy there assets. Works best against uninsured or under insured corps.

Also note that with billions of dollars you can affect the price of a stock. If you by a large portion of the transient shares the price will rise, and then sell short more shares than you have and sell all your real shares and the price will fall, you have maid money. In SR that trick can be cycled every 60 seconds or less.

I don’t have any real training in this field but I could be wrong. But I think that those tricks and probably a lot of others exist but are usually not performed because they are illegal market manipulation and would destroy the integrity of the money markets in the long term, would that stop this man.

Assuming every ten minutes he can manipulate the market enough to make 0.06% in 6 months he will have 5,650,961% on his initial investment, when your starting investment is enough to buy out small corporations and in an age where the market responds within a fraction of a second that kind of return doesn’t seem so far fetched. It isn’t producing anything usable, it isn’t working out witch companies are going to rise in actual value, its all about using your pile of money to manipulate the preserved value of a share.

Edward

I don't really care how much money he has or doesn't. I do think it's a cool idea, though.

It did... That's why there's the chapter in Threats 2. Again you are missing the point. Art is not doing it to make a profit. He is there for revenge. The objectives are different. It is the guy's estimate that Art made trillions. Yes, you can say that is an exageration and the guy got caught up in a fit of pique. But the fact remains that he managed to get enough money to bring down a AA and is on his way to bringing down a AAA. He doesn't care that the runs are traced to him, he doesn't care about failure, he's not afraid to risk it all.

Why is it that Villiers hasn't orbital cowed Art yet, anyway? I'm sure he's well hidden, but Villiers probably has just as much of a mad on going as Art right now.

Well, it's a good point that once exposed, Art should be dead meat.

I don't see how his money trail can be so well hidden that is untraceable. Even Leonardo got tracked down. If you interact as much with the workd as Art do, you can't be as hard to find as a budhist monk hidden in a secret monastery cut off from the world.

If used in a campaign, you should ignore the idea that Art has been exposed in a shadowland file or that he took out Gunderson (that would attract a lot of atention).

Just use him for a few runs related to sinking Villier's corp. Assume that a slow and methodical sabotage of Novatech is all he has planned since his epiphany. Then when the explosive truth comes out, either Art succeeds (and from now on no more Novatech in your campaign) or he comes short and disappear never to surface again after a few company men pin him down.

But this long protracted battle where both enemies are aware of each other, it's indeed a little hard to swallow in that particular case. It's not like Knight vs Cross or Lofwyr vs Alamais. Dankwalther needs secrecy and once the veil is lifted, he must either have succeeded or he won't be able to.

I understand your point. I think it is erroneous.

I give one RL example for some possible rates of return. It took no insider knowledge, all you needed to do was look at the history of the stock coupled with their acquisition/growth plan. They came right out and said they wanted to grow by 20% a year and internal growth would only accomplish a 10% rate. So in their prospectus, they even say they are going to buy smaller companies to get their production capacity and customers.

Why would you pay some team + intermediary 400K to "plant this bomb on the side of tank car BN3842, yes the one with all the poison and hazardous materials on it"? Like my RL Union Carbide India chemical spill example. You could probably get it done for under 10K.

You don't seem to want to accept similar examples that have actually happened. You want to think of the planning of stealing the companies proprietary tech or super secret prototype. You don't have to steal Colonel Sander's secret recipe, you just need to have a few cases of food poisoning that gets a lot of press. Same with something like Coca Cola. You don't need their formula, you only need to put a few rats or mice in a half dozen 2 liters.

Poison a few pain relief pills.

Hire some old lady to spill some hot coffee on her lap and sue. Works even better if you had someone working on the inside to sabotage the coffee makers thermostat and testify it had been that way for months.

Put someone in a rodent suit at an amusement park and have them get filmed cursing at a child them pushing the kid to the ground and kicking him a few times.

None of these are going to put the company out of business, but they will probably affect the stock price for a little while. And if you really want to spend a buttload of resources pulling some intricately planned plot with far reaching ramifications, work those in too.

What makes you think that since the other AAAs know that Art is carrying out his vendetta, they aren't subtly supporting him?

Novatech is holding on to the AAA seat only because of a technicality. That gives Novatech a voice that far outweigh its actual power. How much do you think that the other AAAs without a permanent seat would want Novatech out of the way? Especially if they can make Art their convenient attack dog?

How would this scenario track to art.

Stock A has 10,000,000 shares that are regularly traded, the rest are not on the market the list price is $10 on the UCAS stock exchange. It trades frequently on this exchange by SR standards, averaging 5 trades a second

Holding companies 1-10 purchases 100,000 shares in stock A within a second. Cost 1.05 Million

5 seconds later du to supply dropping 10% the value of stock A increases to $12

Investment companies 11-30 sell short stock promising to sell 50,000 shares each for $11.50, income 1.15 million.

Holding companies 1-10 sell there stock quickly income 1.15 million

The rapid influx of stock drops the price to $9.50

Investment companies 11-30 all settle there debt buying stock for those they promised to give it to, expense 1 million

Monies invested 1.05 million
Net expense 2.05 million
Net income 2.3 million
Net profit $250,000 or just under 25%
Time elapsed 10 seconds

All companies 1-30 are registered in jurisdictions that do not require reporting of ownership although ultimately they trace ownership to art there records are not available on the matrix (and they are small time enough to get away with that).

The only point I expect to be wrong on is the portion of the traded stock you need to buy to or the change in stock price you could create 25% profit is probably overly optimistic but even 5% profit would make the gains he made reasonable

Another couple of steps could be added to increase the profit from this enterprise

You should be able to reproduce this every 20-30 seconds and in parallel be working on other stocks that will behave in a similar manner to utilise the full investment capital and any loans you can secure against your holdings.

As for shadow runs, why do you need to pay 60K a runner, these are basic runs, make a mess, blow that up, make there host crash. Even kill a scientist is only worth 5K a runner. If you want more subtle then fill exec’s home computer with pictures of people raping 8 year olds of both sexes (ideally include sim sense recordings of same) and call the cops as an anonymous informant isn’t going to call for 60K per runner. Maybe 10K including the penalty for having to find pictures that make you puke to use. We aren’t talking about AA or even AA corps here. We are using small companies that can be more easily manipulated.

Indecently what would a run be worth where the entire job was to let it be known that your running against a corp. there actually is no run, just the appearance of the build up to one?

Edward

And that's what they'll do too. When Novatech's resources are being used to strike at Art, the other AAAs are using deniable shadowrunners to strike at Novatech and biting pieces of Villier's holdings.

Oh, and Novatech already knows that Art is after them. And he is succeeding. Honestly, I do not think he even cares about his life as long as Novatech goes down.

That's because he's got no more money. Novatech is already in debt.

Way to ignore the real life examples of things that have affected stock prices and could be duplicated by cheap shadowruns. Instead you put up a strawman argument. But you do go on to ridicule other potentialruns.

Also, how come your Novatech deckers are so much more effective than Art's hired deckers? You seem to think everything Novatech does will be golden and everything anyone else attempts will be rotten.

I said it again and again ; no single high risk investment can absorb 20 billions and investing in tons of different smaller high risk investment is the equivalent of investing in the market ; it yields the market rate.

Nobody listens?

I keep telling you I agree that there are good investments out there. Do I need to quote myself to show it?

Not three posts ago I said :

No, he is using shadowruns to influence the market. Every illegal and unethical means he can employ to obtain his objective. Look at some of the things I listed that have actually happened that influenced a stocks price. Art is duplicating those with shadowruns. They don't cost hundreds of thousands to pull off, maybe tens of thousands.

So he knows what stock is going to move and close enough to when. He can do it to hundreds of different stocks at the same time.