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Message no. 1
From: Randy Nickel <RANNIC@****.COM>
Subject: Playing the stockmarket. Show me the money!!!
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 14:16:08 -0700
Okay, I know very little about stocks and bonds and things of this
nature. I know that if I purchase Microsoft stock at $15 per share and
buy a thousand shares that I just spent $15,000. If the stock goes goes
up to $18 per share I just made $3000.

Now Runners likely can influence stocks in major ways. If a good runner
does his/her homework, he can determine who he is running for and who it
will effect the most. He can go through a stockbroker to purchase a
whatever he can and then sell when the moment looks good.

The question essentially is......how do other GMs handle runners that
like to do this? I mean it's there. The stock market is a major thing in
205x. There is no reason why runners can not make a little extra nuyen
on the side by playing the market.

I was just wondering does anyone know enough about this to maybe give
some advice on how to handle it.

Otter
Message no. 2
From: Mike Elkins <MikeE@*********.COM>
Subject: Re: Playing the stockmarket. Show me the money!!!
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 17:30:14 -0500
<snip: Runners can play the market and win big, right?>

Well, sure. But first a few caveats:

1) To buy or sell stock you need a SIN. Maybe your fake one is good
enough, depends on the circumstances. If you want to do it "right", you
would want to set up a dummy holding corp in the Caymans or
something where they don't care, but count on the bribes and airfare
taking some large slice of your profits.

2) To buy or sell stock you are going to pay commission. If you are a
big customer you might pay 1%. Average joes will pay 4-5%, probably.
If you find a broker who makes a living by catering to those clients
whos SINs might not stand up to the strictest security, expect to pay
whatever he thinks he can scam out of you--20% if you look like a
chump. You will pay this when you buy AND again when you sell.

3) You will pay taxes on your profits. Hopefully your SIN says you live
on a really small income and your tax bracket is low. Hope they don't
get suspicious about how you could afford a big batch of stock then,
too.

4) MegaCorps are BIG and are much better at "spining" bad news than
you are. If you cost MCT 50 million dollars and create a public relations
disaster for them, how much will their stock go down? Not damn much,
and it might just go UP! (It happens). Runners who try this game too
often may just lose their shirts. The best way to do it is if you have a
million dollars worth of the stock to buy and sell at critical moments AND
your own PR flacks to spin the news exactly your way--in other words,
if you are also a corp.

All that said, let the players try it, and probably let them make a little
money at it too. Have most of it go into commissions, of course, and if
they ever try and abuse it, have the market remind them that there is no
such thing as a "sure thing".

Double-Domed Mike
Message no. 3
From: Randy Nickel <RANNIC@****.COM>
Subject: Re: Playing the stockmarket. Show me the money!!!
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 15:07:42 -0700
Double-Domed Mike wrote:
>snip<

>All that said, let the players try it, and probably let them make a
little
>money at it too. Have most of it go into commissions, of course, and
if
>they ever try and abuse it, have the market remind them that there is
no
>such thing as a "sure thing".

All very good points Mike and I will certainly use them. Still there are
sometimes when if you have inside knowledge that many runners do have
then you could in theory make a killing.

Just as an example.

My GM ran us through a series of runs where we were hitting two
different biotech installations. We did several runs against these
installations and in the end both went out of business and the company
we were doing the work for gobbled them up. We later saw in the news
that their stocks had doubled. That's when it clicked in our heads that
we could have made some extra nuyen.

So I think that if the runners see that someone is going to lose and
someone is going to gain they can buy stock and then wait for it to peak
. Soon as it does they sell. They may not be able to do this often but
some runs could be very profitable that way.

Otter
Message no. 4
From: Smilin' Ted <Tuvyah@***.COM>
Subject: Re: Playing the stockmarket. Show me the money!!!
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 18:38:28 EDT
In a message dated 7/1/98 1:42:10 PM, MikE wrote:

>All that said, let the players try it, and probably let them make a little
>money at it too. Have most of it go into commissions, of course, and if
>they ever try and abuse it, have the market remind them that there is no
>such thing as a "sure thing".

But the other thing to remember is that what you are doing is "insider
trading" -- which (at least in today's society) is illegal.

Big deal, you say -- so's the shadowrun that made me want to buy the stock in
the first place. True. But buying that stock requires you to have a legal
identity, a SIN -- it leaves all kinds of electron trails that the shadowrun
does not (if you ran it correctly).

Look at it from an SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) decker's point of
view. It's November. Out of nowhere, Yamatetsu stock prices plunge fifty
points, on word of the destruction of their most advanced biotech lab.
Yamatetsu stockholders take a bath. But examining ownership patterns more
closely, your friendly neighborhood decker notices that ONE guy -- we'll call
him "Shadey" -- made a profit. How? Maybe he "sold short" -- i.e. he
committed
IN AUGUST to providing Yamatetsu shares IN NOVEMBER. He got his money IN
AUGUST at AUGUST prices. Now November has come around. He buys the Yamatetsu
shares at their much lower November prices, provides them to his buyer, and
walks off with the difference....mucho nuyen.

Pretty damn clever of Shadey, neh? TOO clever...since there's no evidence
apparent to the decker that Shadey *ever* dabbled in the stock market before.
He established his stock trading account the day before he sold short on
Yamatetsu. This is enough to set off a full-scale UCAS Federal investigation
(or worse,a corporate investigation) of Shadey's life, background, SIN, and
past. If evidence is found that he had insider information, then he's off to
prison. (White-collar crime's a killer; they got Al Capone on a tax evasion
charge.)

So to benefit safely from insider trading, a runner has to make it seem like a
normal part of his/her stock-trading routine.

Smilin' Ted
Message no. 5
From: Max Rible <slothman@*********.ORG>
Subject: Re: Playing the stockmarket. Show me the money!!!
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 14:40:54 -0800
At 14:16 7/1/98 -0700, Randy Nickel wrote:
>Okay, I know very little about stocks and bonds and things of this
>nature. I know that if I purchase Microsoft stock at $15 per share and
>buy a thousand shares that I just spent $15,000. If the stock goes goes
>up to $18 per share I just made $3000.
>
>Now Runners likely can influence stocks in major ways. If a good runner
>does his/her homework, he can determine who he is running for and who it
>will effect the most. He can go through a stockbroker to purchase a
>whatever he can and then sell when the moment looks good.
>
>The question essentially is......how do other GMs handle runners that
>like to do this?

We've had a number of times like that in our campaign. At one point,
the runners used a team of earth elementals to dig a tunnel under a
corporate installation and break in from below to perform an extraction.
I remarked that we should've invested in companies that made seismic
sensors before we pulled a stunt like that; their stock went up as
Knight-Errant suddenly added "seismic detection" to the usual set of
sensors and all the other companies noticed and followed in their wake.

The PC's haven't tried doing any direct investment in the stock market,
but when they ran into a fixer who specialized in that sort of thing, they
kept his number, and let him know when they expect a stock to change and
in what direction. He then gives them 10% of whatever profit he makes
off the transaction; he's started with smaller investments, but they're
going up as the team's tips prove reliable.

The two simplest ways to make money in the stock market are:
1. Pick a stock that will go up. Buy shares and sell them when the price
is higher.
2. Pick a stock that will go down and short it. (Hit some investment
sites if you want to know the mechanics of it-- basically, you can
make money on the difference in price just like you can when the
stock goes up. The risk is that if the stock goes up instead of
down, you may have to pay for the stock at the new higher price.)

Either one can be applied to the target of a shadowrun, depending on
your expected effect.

There are a lot of financial sites on the web that can explain the
mechanics of it... but maybe some of us should get together and do
a netbook...

--
%% Max Rible % slothman@*********.org % http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "Before enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice. %%
%% After enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice." - me %%
Message no. 6
From: Erik Jameson <erikj@****.COM>
Subject: Re: Playing the stockmarket. Show me the money!!!
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 19:40:21 -0400
At 03:07 PM 7/1/98 -0700, you wrote:

Looks like our friend Randy should find himself a copy of Corporate
Shadowfiles. Discusses just the sort of thing you are talking about.

>So I think that if the runners see that someone is going to lose and
>someone is going to gain they can buy stock and then wait for it to peak
>. Soon as it does they sell. They may not be able to do this often but
>some runs could be very profitable that way.

As Mike pointed out, it would be rather difficult for shadowrunners to
manipulate stock, especially on anything vaguely approaching a regular basis.

What is far more common is this sort of scenario:

Mr. Johnson offers say 50K nuyen worth of stock to the team for a job to be
done. Says that if they do the job right, it should cause the value of
that stock to increase, at least in the short term, generating a potential
bonus of say, another 15K.

The team does the work. The corporation uses their PR dept. Stock bounces
upwards for a day or week. The PCs can either sell their stocks (probably
right back to the Mr. Johnson in reality) and grab that bonus of simply
hang on to those stocks, sort of putting a bit away for a rainy day sort of
deal.

Everyone's happy. Mr. Johnson got the job done. The runners did a better
job because they had an investing in doing a better job, creating a bonus
for them at no expense to the Johnson.

A bit like stock options and profit sharing right now...

Erik J.

URL to go here...
Message no. 7
From: Randy Nickel <RANNIC@****.COM>
Subject: Re: Playing the stockmarket. Show me the money!!!
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 16:57:09 -0700
Eric wrote:

>Looks like our friend Randy should find himself a copy of Corporate
>Shadowfiles. Discusses just the sort of thing you are talking about.

I got it. I was just wanting to see if I could get some more detailed
information, and I did. Thanks to all. :-)

Otter
Message no. 8
From: Matt Compton <NEWSHADOW@***.COM>
Subject: Re: Playing the stockmarket. Show me the money!!!
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 19:58:01 EDT
In a message dated 98-07-01 17:12:10 EDT, you write:

> The question essentially is......how do other GMs handle runners that
> like to do this? I mean it's there. The stock market is a major thing in
> 205x. There is no reason why runners can not make a little extra nuyen
> on the side by playing the market.
>
> I was just wondering does anyone know enough about this to maybe give
> some advice on how to handle it.

If your runner has no SIN, which they most likely don't, then they will have
to go to a "Shadow" market. I don't run myself, but the Corp book covers the
subject fairly well.

NewShadow
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Arena/6852/index.html
Message no. 9
From: Gurth <gurth@******.NL>
Subject: Re: Playing the stockmarket. Show me the money!!!
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 11:42:19 +0100
Randy Nickel said on 14:16/1 Jul 98,...

> The question essentially is......how do other GMs handle runners that
> like to do this? I mean it's there. The stock market is a major thing in
> 205x. There is no reason why runners can not make a little extra nuyen
> on the side by playing the market.

The one time one of my players wanted his character to buy
stock, we decided to use RL stock, and convert the prices to
nuyen at a 1:1 ratio. So, if the character wanted to buy Renraku
stock, and I'd selected Philips stock (say, 150 guilders each) to
base it on, then Renraku stock would be 150 nuyen. If the Philips
stock were to go up to 155 guilders, Renraku stock would go up
to 155 nuyen. Just look in your newspaper to find some prices
and you're set.

The only problem with this is that you can't base stock prices on
the actions of the runners, which appears to be what you want to
do. Perhaps you could do it something like this: assess the effect
of the shadowrun against the corp, using the rules in Corporate
Shadowfiles for rating corporations. Then roll a number of D6s
equal to the number of points by which the corp's net rating
changed, and alter stock prices from the newspaper (or however
you decided on them) by a percentage equal to your rolls.

For example, the players pull a run for Ares and bring its
Aerospace value up to 13 (from 11); you roll 2D6, getting 9, so
Ares stock goes up by 9%.

--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Could you ever be alone?
-> NERPS Project Leader * ShadowRN GridSec * Unofficial Shadowrun Guru <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/plastic.html <-
-> The New Character Mortuary: http://www.electricferret.com/mortuary/ <-

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