[XelosUchiha]

Are there any rules anywhere for the Stock Market in Shadowrun? One of my players has been reading all of the supplements such as sixth world almanac and seattle 2072 and has come to me with his plan to invest his shadowrun money using his fake SIN into the stock market. He has even printed out a list and charts detailing all of his stock purchases and the reason he should be making money (this guy is an economist irl so its tough to argue with him). Does it say anywhere in the book anything about buy stock or even purchasing subsidiaries of corporations to make money on the side?

If i just let him go, i know that within a few game months he'll be making hundreds of thousands of nuyen.

[The Big Peat]

I don't know of any charts but thats not to say someone else mightn't.

Personally, I'd make him do a Logic + Knowledge: Financial Markets check to see how well his investments do; unless his character has the ability to pull this off, I wouldn't let the player do it no matter how good the plans based on his real world knowledge are.

Then b) the moment I didn't like how much money he was making, rule that the law have found out its a fake SIN and have confiscated the funds. Or he invested in a company that was lying through their teeth and have just crashed and lost him tons. Or, some other fairly merciless way, take the money off him. I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to find a reason to do so either what with the difficulties of being a professional criminal using a fake ID to actively invest in the stock market. Sooner or later he'll slip (particularly if he uses the SIN he runs under).

There is also a ton of harassment that can come with the territory, particularly depending on how heavily he's playing the market (messages from your broker requiring instant attention during the middle of combat would be annoying I imagine). Extortion and blackmail are both on the table.

However, if you really don't want him to do this, I'd just say "I want a game about Shadowrunning, not Corporate Trading. If you do this, it will be a side thing gaining limited benefits. If you can't stick by that, then please don't do it at all."

[XelosUchiha]

With all his enhancements he has a Logic 9 plus he has Knowledge: Economics, Finance, Business, and Brokerage. And then if he magically raises his Logic to its maximum he rolls massive successes on all of his checks.

If you've seen the movie Limitless, that's what this mage is like. That is a good idea though, having a big brokerage deal come down in the middle of a run or something like that. Or some other way I can make him choose.

[Ranger]

I don't know of the markets and buying selling per se but I do know in the old Corp Shadowfiles and Corporate Download it does have the rules for tracking the markets and the effects that the runners action have on them if that helps at all.  I am pretty sure they are OOP though, so you might need to search for them in the usual places.

[BSOD]

To be honest I doubt you could get away with making huge amounts. Once he starts to make a lot companies will start looking at who this trader is, and a fake SIN won't hold up to scrutiny if someone starts doing large numbers of background checks.

[The Big Peat]

Welp... if the guy has paid for the logic and skills, I can't blame him for wanting to use them. That said - either apply a large threshold for successes, or start making it an opposed check against someone else fairly hyper-smart, and that will reduce the effects of his giant success rolls. It makes sense as well. Playing the market is not easy.

[baronspam]

The first thing you have to look at is he investing for long term gains or is he trying for large amount of profit quickly.  If he is buying and holding large cap stocks, highly rated bonds, etc, that is pretty safe, but those kind of things move slowly.  Even if he is good at it he would likely be making 10-15% on his money per year.  If he could make  twenty he should stop running and manage a hedge fund.

Trying to make larger amounts of money faster means taking larger positions in riskier stocks.  If you invest in a small company, say a biotech company, and they have one product come out that is huge in their field the value of that stock is going to skyrocket.  But by the same token, if you take a large position and the company ends up second to market with their product, or six months later it turns out the product causes chronic constipation and suddenly no one is buying it then the stock is suddenly worth pennies on the dollar.  Throw in the fact that corporate raiders in shadowrun use assault rifles and things can get really, really volatile.  Nobody picks right all the time because there are unknown and unpredictable factors at work.

Also, there is the constant risk that investments under a fake SIN will be seized if the SIN is cracked.  To avoid this he is going to have to be frequently moving money to multiple new and expensive SINs, or using black market services that will take a piece of the action as well.  Either way it cuts into the profits.

Is he day trading?  If so then he basically doesn't have time to be a runner.  Those guys work 60-80 hours a week with extreme levels of stress an most of them loose money in the end.

So I guess what I am saying is that I would allow him to make a reasonable return on money he invests.  Don't let him print money up from nothing, however, it just doesn't work that way.  No matter how smart the guy is a part time investor with no staff picking his own stocks off of publicly available research isn't going to have money falling from the sky.  He can either play it safe, and maybe double his money every five years as long as there isn't a recession, or play it risky, but then there will be times when he has big scores and times when he looses his ass. 

[The Cat]

I've had a few characters I've played and a couple I GMed that tinkered in the stock markets.  The first problem was the SIN as people are mentioning.

Nearly everyone came up with the same solution to the SIN problem.  For "low level" investing, enough earnings to keep a fairly simple lifestyle (up to and including Medium) going nigh-indefinately, a good fake SIN was enough since it was through legitimate or fairly legitimate investment groups/clubs headed up by someone else.  The "big stuff" like selling short on the corp they were about to hit in some spectacular way thus causing a stock dip or putting some money into the corp they just handed over the revolutionary software source code to, was handled by simply having a legit contact at a high level that did the investing for them for a cut of the proceeds.  We all learned to just keep our own names out of it and use legit contacts to do it and accept the "wow we made 25% on the investment, but 10 of it went to our ID Shield" as a cost of doing business.  Beyond that, one of my earlier GMs came up with a randomized chart for investments not doing as well as expected or doing better than expected to simulate other factors outside the normal operation of the markets (other shadowruns, rate change announcements and the like).  The chart leaned slightly towards investments doing better tha expected to simulate that the markets do tend to tilted towards "success" slightly.

The third "type" of investing we tinkered with was "background investing" and "promotional shares."  In the first case the character had some legit non-voting investments that brought in smallish sums to cover some basic expenses and simple equipment replacements.  In the second, the character owned some promotional stock in the company ought with promotional materials (think the old Camel Cash RJ Reynolds put out for about 15 or 20 years but instead of RJR corp script ot was RJR promo stock) and could replace simple items with branded merchandise from the issuing company for free (for instance, I had a rigger who was famous for destroying things like radios and pocket secretaries but he always had a Camel one standing by as a replacement).  It was mostly a fun little character quirk to add in and didn't really require any GM policing except to say "yeah, you can get one of those for free" or "no, that item isn't in their promo vaults."

[baronspam]

Another thought I had, let him buy a house rule positive quality called "Investment Wizard" or something similar.  You could base the cost on Trust Fund.  For 20 BP you have a High lifestyle. Maybe for 10 BP you have a Middle Lifestyle.  You have to spend a certain amount of time managing your funds, and if you are cut off from Matrix access for a significant period (mission inside the ACHE, working a job in the Gobi desert and there just aint no damn wireless, etc) it might cost you some money. 

[Tecumseh]

There could be some fun plot hooks in letting the PC play an investor. The Cat alludes to shorting the stock of a company the runner is about to hit to profit off of the resulting drop in stock price (à la the villain in Casino Royale). If the run is a success then it could trigger an investigation by a government regulator wondering why the PC (or the SINner he recruited to front the trade) had such remarkable timing and insight.

Or, coming from the other direction, the PC gets wind of a shadow op targeting his favorite start-up company. Their lead researcher is about to be kidnapped or their primary factory/facility is about to be bombed just as it is coming online, prompting the PC to intervene as an unexpected white knight. (Or, if he's lazy, switch his investment from long to short, which leads to the original scenario of being investigated.) Maybe the PC has to lay out some cash of his own to hire his team to back him up as he protects his investment, or promise them a cut of the profits. I would let him run with his plan, but remind him (through gameplay) that there is no easy money to be made.

[beowulf_of_wa]

There could be some fun plot hooks in letting the PC play an investor. The Cat alludes to shorting the stock of a company the runner is about to hit to profit off of the resulting drop in stock price (à la the villain in Casino Royale). If the run is a success then it could trigger an investigation by a government regulator wondering why the PC (or the SINner he recruited to front the trade) had such remarkable timing and insight.

of course, that's assuming that the investment is pretty large, there are millions of reasons why people will sell their stock, and only massive transactions "just in time" would garner any attention.

[Tecumseh]

of course, that's assuming that the investment is pretty large, there are millions of reasons why people will sell their stock, and only massive transactions "just in time" would garner any attention.

It's Shadowrun. It will happen if the GM wants it to happen. Whatever is fun and interesting will usually prevail over what's most realistic.

[CanRay]

I had an idea of including things like this in my first campaign.  Big mistake.  My own experience was too limited to have put it through properly.

So, I had them deal with some major consequences, and the group had to steal a cow.

[Zilfer]

I had an idea of including things like this in my first campaign.  Big mistake.  My own experience was too limited to have put it through properly.

So, I had them deal with some major consequences, and the group had to steal a cow.

why a cow?

[CanRay]

Well, they decided that Megacorporations weren't the only ones that could destroy other companies to drive up market prices.  And they crashed the stock on the wrong company.

It was a Mafia front, and the group's Mafia Contact, who only spoke in a whisper before, called them up, freaking out, and they had to steal a cow.