GearCity includes a robust stock market simulation of companies in the game.

While its purpose is to raise money and show ownership within the game, you could play the entire game as a stockholding company if you want to.

We’ll cover the fundamentals of the stock market and how to use the features in the game.

What is the stock market?

To understand the stock market, first, you must know what a stock is.

A stock is fractional ownership of a company.

For example, if a company has 100 stocks issued, then owning 1 stock would mean you own 1% of that company. 

If you owned 100 stocks, you would own 100% of the company.

Like everything in the world, stocks can be bought and sold. 

The value of a single stock is called a share price, and it changes every minute based on supply and demand.

Here is a list of your company and publically traded companies. Let’s select one to see the stock information.

Here you can see the total number of shares, and here is the share price.

In general, the better the company does, the higher the share price will go. And if the company does poorly, the share price will fall.

Global events, such as war and depression can also impact stock prices.

There are many metrics for individual companies in the Stock Report, located here. Watch the Stock Report Tutorial video for a breakdown of these.

For the most part, when looking to purchase a stock, you need to concern yourself with the Earnings Per Share.

This value is the amount of profits or losses the company is making per share. The higher this value is compared to the share price, the better value this company is to buy.

Another interesting value to look at is dividends. Dividends are the amount of money each quarter the company pays to shareholders per share.

For example, if the dividend was $0.05, and you owned 100 shares. Your quarterly payment would be $5.

Buying stocks is easy. First, make sure that there are shares available for you to purchase by looking here.

Then click “Purchase Shares.”

Select the number of shares you want to buy and then hit purchase shares.

You can view the shares you own by clicking your company and then selecting “Holdings”.

The list will update with the companies you own.

Selling shares works the same as buying them, except you need to have shares in the “Holdings” value.

The general rule of thumb is to buy low, sell high. Keep that in mind when you purchase and sell shares.

What about going public yourself?

The game allows you to issue an Initial Public Offering, also known as an IPO.

An IPO is where you sell part of your company to the public, and your company becomes publically traded like any other stock in the game.

IPOs allow you to raise a lot of money quickly. But in most cases, you can only do this once per game. The only way you can do it again is if you own all the shares of your company.

The downsides of an IPO is that other companies will own a part of your company. If you’re playing on harder difficulty levels, and you own less than 50% of your company, there is a chance shareholders can fire you for poor performance.

While owning shares of a company, you may notice something called a split.

The value of a company is share price times the total number of shares.

When share prices get too high or too low, companies will split the shares.

When they split, the share price will change, and so will the total number of shares. But the value of the company remains the same.

For example, if the share price of a company is too low, they will do a 2-for-1 split. Let’s say before the split, the share price is $1, and there are a total of 1 Million shares. The value of the company is $1 Million.

In exchange for every 2 shares that someone owns, they get 1 post-split share. This action leaves the company with 500,000 shares at $2 per share. The value of the company remains the same.

A 1-for-2 split works the opposite way. Owners get 2 shares for every one share they own, and it cuts the price of the shares in half.

See the Stock Report video tutorial for more details and metrics you should look for when buying shares of a company.

See the Company Acquisition and Marque video tutorial for details about taking over companies.