Market Discussions

Are you thinking assisted corporation stock market, so it has in game features for listing prices and setting sell/buy orders?

I haven't checked can you create contract from stocks. If one could do that it would be quite nice mechanic already for offering stocks for sale and also offer to buy stocks.

Having more wide stock markets though could put some pressure in changing how corporate stocks are created and handled. Currently it is easy to create those and as easy to abandon corp, making stocks to vanish. Could be that it'd need two tiers, publically listed corporations and limited corporations who can only sell stock directly.

But yeah, I'm in favor of getting stocks more in the play. Puts just quite much more stress to individual CEOs to understand what they are doing (not that all RL CEO's know :P ).

Well I think the first step would be allowing CEOs & Directors to convert company stock into actual in-game items (the same way you can with a PLEX). Of course, since we live in a computerized age, just like PLEX you should also be able to convert them back and forth between "phantom" items and "physical" items as well. Meaning that no one would have to physically transfer them from place to place unless they really wanted to (and were really insane).

The conversion ability would really be to simply give them a development doorway to make them items that can be traded on the same regular market as everything else (again, same as PLEX mechanics).

As for the trust issue: I agree, paranoia and scamming are a regular part of EvE's diet. However, they're both also a regular part of Wall Street's diet as well, so I don't see that as being a "problem" per se; just more realism if you ask me. Of course people will make up fake companies and try to scam people with junk shares, and of course people will find fifty new ways to rip each other off with it. That alone should be enough to motivate CCP to want to do it, hee hee.

But for those shrewd enough it could still be profitable and interesting, especially if mechanics are added for automatic dividend rates. To make it more interesting and EvE-centric they could add special dividend options for shareholders. For instance, one dividend type would be the classic "% of gross profit" type, wherein a certain (tiny) amount of every ISK that goes into the company accounts get siphoned off to shareholders automatically. Or there could be a "mining dividend" that siphons off from ore processing (just like the "we take" mechanic for stations) whenever that activity happens. Or a "bounty dividend" that siphons off rats or even a "mission" dividend from mission rewards. Why all the crazy types? Specialized companies, naturally, could then issue specialized stock to specialized investors.

For example: XYZ Mining Corp issues stocks with a mining dividend. In lieu of ISK payouts to shareholders, their "dividend rate" would actually be a percentage of refined minerals that is siphoned off and divvied out to their shareholders at the end of each payout period. For a venture capitalist who is running a dedicated Production company, this might be a good stock to look at it, because getting your payout in raw materials instead of ISK might actually be more useful to you (skips the middlemen, as it were).

Now as for the trust & paranoia issues, yes that would be massive at first. But as time goes on companies would build & lose reputation, and I believe that it is this reputation that would ultimately decide how their stocks are traded. A large company that has been around for a long time would be considered the "blue chips" of the game and subsequently their stocks would be stable, trusted, and the most traded. It would be the smaller, newer, and always-at-war companies that only the really speculative investors (or plain stupid) would be likely to bother with.

Avoiding dividend scamming: Simple mechanics here, really. A pay-period could be daily, weekly or monthly, as decided when the stock is issued. However the "siphon pool" for that payout would be constant. Meaning that a CEO could not simply empty out their Master Wallet one minute before the pay-out timer to avoid paying their shareholders. That payout would be a separate, invisible and inaccessible pool taken out of all transactions at all times: Just like SCC tax, for example. Actually, SCC would be the best way to look at it - the dividend pool would function exactly like a second SCC tax (at whatever that dividend rate is), with the only difference being that the ISK (or whatever) doesn't magically vaporize like actual SCC tax does. Instead it goes into the invisible dividend pool to be paid out to shareholders later.

Another feature for stock options that would be a must: Is this voting stock Y/N? Naturally people would be loathe to issue shares if they think they can be used to take over their company, so the option of creating non-voting stock would be needed. This would, naturally, make actual voting stock a premium - and that's a good thing.

Alright, explain why. This is interesting.

Ah now that is interesting, and worth considering! Thanks!

Sadly enough this is not possible yet. It would be an easy to implement first step that would take us a long way. Currently stock transfers are based on trust: you pay first and pray that the other guy gives you the stocks, or you give him the stocks and wait for him to pay you.

Dead end.

I've said this before. All discussion of stock markets boils down to 1 single problem:

Stocks are pieces of corporations, and corporations have zero value because there is no mechanism to "lock" corporate assets to the corporation. The ability to lock BPOs was a first step that was obviously part of this line of thinking, but it never went further, and certainly not far enough to resolve the problem. Thus, stocks have no value.

You would have to completely rework Eve to allow for a corporate asset storage system. Currently, if a corporation buys an asset, that asset is controlled by anyone with permission to "deliver" the asset, thus making it a privately owned asset. If a corporation wants to sell an asset, it must first be "delivered", thus defeating the whole purpose of the delivery 'hangar'. There's also no mechanism to transport said undelivered assets from one location to the next without it passing through someone's private control.

Fix that, and then we're talking, kinda. You'd also have to work out some kind of incentive system that makes it more lucrative to corporate directors to NOT rob their corporations blind. Make it worth their while, since the traditional RL DISincentive of the law is, by design, lacking in Eve. But as mentioned above, that second problem just needs some creative thinking, not any changes to Eve.

yeah, it would be nice. volatility would be astronomical initially, and the stock with actual value behind it would get too expensive too fast, and once it does i dont think any trading will take place...

but who cares, its a game.

Whereas collateralized offerings, ideally with a board of trustees to lock down the assets are a sure-fire fool-proof totally safe investment.

That's depressing. I suppose i'll just have to be one of those few exceptions to the rule. Good thing that's what I was planning on anyway. :)

OT, stocks may seem like a kinda cool idea, but as others have said in practice it probably won't work out too well. Also it is almost certain to be just another way for scammers to do their work.

But... who knows? Maybe CCP will make a working stock system someday. :o

As investments go, seems like it worked out for you.