Assembly Hall

Set up a website and run such a service. There's nothing stopping you.

Well we would need more or less a stock market if we think about the stocks.

Mainly they are used to lock down assets and remove afk ceo:s.

So if you want a new stock system it would need a complete makeover and an actual stock market where corporations could enlist. Stocks would be traded and so on.

I would actualy like to see something like this. Tought the ability to manipulare or miss use of the market would be something that ccp would need to think about. But it would be fun in a way.

Seeing stocks from alliances and how they would flucktuate or something like that. Dunno.

Interesting idea in genereal.

Having a public and private stock is possible. There are companies out there that have multiple types of stock and they could serve different purposes in game

As an observation, aside from another form of making money--which this clearly is a very cool way of doing so if it ever actually worked--what would be the purpose of a public stock? As mentioned currently the stock system is a way to deal with inter-corporation issues, like absence.

In reality, corporations offer public stock as a way of securing additional capital to invest in some project. Now for the most part, corporations in Eve exist to feed some part of the war engine: resource mining, production and/or war. Now reality, you could argue, is no different, though we are perhaps a little less obsessed with war, and there's a rather significant service sector in modern economies that simply does not exist in EVE. No space-plumbers. The thing is that if war is that much more constant and corporations and alliances rise and fall in power (and existence) at a rapid pace.

The end result being the question: How do you protect investors?

The obvious trend, atmosphere, or sentiment in the EVE community would seem to be, "You don't." Anyone can lose everything just like they can in reality...

...sort of. There are plenty of government bodies that have oversight and regulatory power over stock exchanges, because unlike EVE, governments are not made up of a collection of corporations. What is more is that these It is, in fact, one of the most care bear environments you can imagine. There are rules regarding insider trading, stock manipulation, fraud, accounting principles, required periodic disclosures. I imagine that no one is going to want to actually do any of this work in game. I mean there is a reason that accountants make so much money: no one wants to do this in reality. I can't imagine a significant amount of people would want to do it in game. I could be wrong, because there may, in fact, be whole corporations made up of CPA's who might drop everything they are doing to just work the books, but I doubt it. That is not counting the whole question of 'what if they lie/cheat?' In reality, there is jail and that's where you go. In EVE, sure CONCORD may shoot at you, but if you're in 0.0, there's no applicable penalty. The end result is that you'd somehow have to ask CCP to automate this

The other thing about reality versus EVE is that corporations own things in reality, while players functionally own everything in EVE. If the company that I work for goes out of business, its assets would be liquidated and whatever money remained would be divided among its investors. If a company is dissolved in EVE, there is really very little implication there

So I've written 2700 characters, and if anyone is still reading, you probably already get what I'm saying or you wonder 'whats your point?' Well, the point is that without some sort of safeguard, history has shown us that people will bend the system until it breaks (Great Depression) and that some amount of regulation would be required to make this work. The alternative (everyone does what they want) would likely lead to corporations making decisions to sell a whole bunch of stock, then close up their doors and run off with the money. The only other way I could see it working is if corporations would have to put up items for collateral on a semi-permanent or permanent basis that would guarantee the fund to a certain degree, but at that point, you're really only guaranteeing that you might only ask investors to lose some percentage of their wealth if players do some financial acrobatics in game that are not possible in a stock market that we envision in our head, this NYSE of the stars

Do you have CONCORD fly fleets out into nulsec or lowsec to try to reclaim or punish players who cheat this system? Can they liquidate a titan? Who would buy it? Me? Please?

And the reason why some protection of the investors is essential to this idea is basically that if the stock market is known to be the hive of only liars and cheats, then no one would use it, and though it might be in the game, it wouldn't do anyone any good. Is there a simple or elegant solution that CCP could use as a sound foundation for this? Government has been at this for 400 years without creating much of anything that is either simple or elegant, and that may not be saying much, with how government operates, but I think its probably a tall order never-the-less

So... I like the idea, I just don't see how you could get it to work. Bonds are a much more viable option, though there is potential debt and defraud involved there too.

/signed

+1 for a stock market

But, I suggest not using existing shares. Allow a corp to have another set of stocks that can be placed on the market. Current stocks are already integrated into things, adding on top of them, as they are would make matters worse. As they exist now, they are trying to do too many things already.

Perhaps allow a corp to issue shares after they register with some NPC brokerage service. They can issue up to 100,000 shares for a one million ISK fee.

Regardless of the above, a lot of data will need to be exposed to make a stock market viable in Eve. Historical value, dividend history, top ten holders and their individual buy and sells over time, how widely held, etc.

Any other thoughts on this topic?