Sharemarket Listings

When bonds are issued I agree they should be listed as individual issue listings as they could have different maturities and interest rates.

Shares in a company are a different issue and I would ask you to consider the following changes.
A: Market Capitalisation leader board should have every company starting at 2 million. When shares are issued at 2g that would not change - just the ownership of the shares would change. When the unit price on the market changes, so does the market capitalisation.

B: If different tranches of shares are issued they should be grouped together under the one listing showing how many issued to public and how many in total.

C: Dividends when paid should be paid uniformly for all shares issued to the public

D: Perhaps more difficult, but permissible pricing of shares should reflect a multiple of net profit after tax for the previous year / years rather than just net assets.

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Thank you for these thoughts, we will put them in our system.

POSTED

Hey Firey,

Just reviewing and thinking about your suggestions. Here are some thoughts:

A: I don’t think this would work well because this approach assumes all of the 1 million shares of a company are owned and no new shares are issued. In the real world, a company has to issue new shares in order to raise money. For example, let’s say that you personally own all the shares of your company. If you sell some of your shares, the money you get from the sale goes to you personally, not your company. The only way for the company to raise money is to issue new shares out of treasury. This is why GW companies start with 1 million shares and then new shares are issued when raising money.

B: This sounds like a display issue that we will have to improve on. We do have work to do on this.

C: Not sure I understand what you mean by this?

D: We use EQUITY because it is a more reliable and realistic number for pricing shares. For example, let’s say a company has g1 million in CASH and no assets or liabilities. This same company has a net loss of $100,000 for the past year(s). Even though the company is not profitable, it still has g1 million in cash and its shares must be valued at least g1 million. Profit would not provide a realistic or reliable number. Now, in the real world (and in GW), an investor should use recent profit as an indicator for how they will value shares. That g1 million cash business should be valued much higher if they are profitable recently, and may be valued lower if they are not. Recent profit should be an indicator for how much value to add to or reduce EQUITY. I hope this makes sense.

On A: OK I agree that nothing should be listed until an IPO is done. I also agree that you begin with 1 million shares and when you issue shares you dilute your holding as it shows in your profile. Let’s use my holding company as an example… My first IPO was 100k shares at 64g.

My view is that afterwards my market capitalisation was 70.4 million ie 1.1 million shares at 64. When those shares traded up to 115 then my market cap should be 126.5million.
B: I just issued another tranche of shares for the sake of this topic. 50k shares at 178. So now I believe the display of my shares in the all stocks listing should read 1.15 million shares at 178 = market cap of 204.7million. Maybe a dropdown would show shareholders including 1 million shares held by me.
What currently displays is one tranche of 100k shares and a different listing of the second tranche of 50k shares…

C: Dividends. I now have 2 listings that I can pay dividends on. The original 100k tranche and the second one of 50k. That is a big mistake I think. Let’s say I had friends and non friends in the game and my non friends happened to buy shares in one of the tranches. There’s nothing stopping me from paying lots of dividends to the tranche owned by my friends and nothing to the other tranche (not to forget the work involved if you have 5 or 6 issues of shares)
New shares issued should rank equally with previously sold shares for dividends and the easiest way to do that coding wise is to ignore issue numbers and just accumulate the holdings.

D: I agree the current pricing is OK and in fact if profit was used it would have much more potential for abuse.

(Edit to fix typos)

(A) I agree with you. Seems we have a bug there we have to look into.

(B) Another item we will have to review.

© You are exactly right. Since all shares in GW are the same, then all shareholders should be treated equally and dividends must be paid equally to all. Players should not have the option to distribute dividends to some share issues and not others. Seems this issue came about because our share issues are using similar code as the bond issues. With bond issues, each bond does have to be treated separately. But this is not the case with share issues. We will add this to our fix list.

(D) Great.

Thanks for working through these issues with me!

Yes, thank you Fireyscorp.

POSTED

I know this is an old thing but I think that the share pricing should be like the RL markets where it’s: equity / total shares outstanding. This would allow the stock market to be more maintained on it’s own and players would just have to issue stocks instead of listing a price that isn’t even proportional to the company.

The stock prices are based on what you suggest, but we allow + or - 10% so that a player can sell slightly below or above current book value.

It’s time to re-raise this topic and in particular Item A from my first post.
(Two days back and he’s at it again - exploiting loopholes to such a ridiculous extent that it breaks the game - this time using phoneix - Phoenix? and Byfield)

You will now note a ridiculous number of IPO listings for phoneix each with just a few shares just to get the hire of investment bank(100 bxp) and IPO (300 bxp) each time. That’s going to grind the share module down and make going through listings a chore.

The simplest and most elegant way to fix that is to have only one accumulated listing per holding company where multiple share issuances are allowed but there is only ever 1 IPO. That solves the uneven dividend issue, the multiple IPO bxp grab and neatens up the stock market which can then be sorted alphabetically.

Of course the multiple bxp awarding per day for hire investment bank should be closed as well. Also I note companies are still able to buy businesses above their bxp level which allowed for byfield to be created and have a bank transferred into it on day 1.

It’s nice to see some break testing back highlighting weaknesses of the game :slight_smile:

Hey FIrey, I believe these items are already on our fix list and some may already be fixed on our development servers but haven’t been pushed live yet until the next reset. But we will double check (Nigel?).

@Fireyscorp, Yes, as @MathewGeorghiou reported, this has been both identified and fixed by our De3v Team. All events are now once a day at most. IPO will only happen once now. The events will show up but the BXP will not be awarded.

This will be live after a couple of days in house testing.

You will also love to hear that the Markets will be moving to teh single listing you noted. This si being worked on as we speak.

That is excellent news!
:relieved:

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The sharemarkets are certainly improved from previous rounds!

I know they aren’t at the centre of the game but they can be made better in my view.

Firstly I note that all shareholders appear under the one listing now - no matter which tranche of offering they bought from. But we’re still showing multiple listings of people did multiple offerings. The answer is simple enough.

Let’s put a restriction on it just to slow down the multi’s - no player can IPO until they get to either 3000 bxp or 5 million in equity. At that point, whether they choose to list or not they are listed in the sharemarket in Alphabetical order. If they do not IPO, then the player owns all 2 million shares and the valuation for the purpose of market capitisation rankings is equity (divided by 2 million shares)

If they have done an IPO then those shares can be traded within a range + / - around equity based on what the market is willing to pay.

I like the suggestion in chat that we should be able to bid for shares and have those bids accepted in an ongoing market, but I won’t add more points now as I recognise it’s not the main game.

@Fireyscorp, thank you for your comments on this. We have passed this to the Dev Team for review.

POSTED

@FIREY,

These are good suggestions…

(1) I like no IPO until you hit a certain amount of bxp and equity. What makes you recommend 3000 bxp and g5 million?

(2) Alpha order list is a good idea.

(3) Not sure I understand what you mean by IPO or choose not to IPO? And not sure what you mean about the 2 million shares?

(4) Share market value based on +/- equity is what we do now.

(5) Agree that BID and ASK option is a good idea and something we should work towards.

(6) Not sure I understand this, “But we’re still showing multiple listings of people did multiple offerings.”

@MathewGeorghiou - Responses

(1) It was 3000 bxp OR g 5 million, but probably the 3000 bxp is the better one to go with… You can get there in one day if you do the courses but generally that shows a level of commitment to the game so the market isn’t full of tried and failed players. You could go both bxp and equity of course. I would envisage at that point a mail arrives congratulating the player and telling them they have now unlocked the sharemarket module and as such their company is now listed leading to
(3) The company would initially be listed as 2 million shares all owned by the player. Any subsequent IPO or capital raising would reduce the 2 million shares by the amount of shares sold to the “public” leading to (4). As initially there would be no listing price it would be whatever the equity was divided by 2 million, whereas once listed there would be more leeway in the traded price. I think there is probably room to use some factor of annual earning in the price limits here…

To differentiate between private and public companies the listing would simply display a % of public ownership - 0 for private and between 1% and 49% for public.

(6) If you look at Stoner Group in the stocks listing, he went to the market twice and he is listed there twice. Under each listing all of the combined shareholdings are shown. I’m talking about the All Stocks listing.

Further detail.
All stocks listing would show all companies that had reached the threshold to be included in the sharemarket - both private and public.
(Market Capitalisation ranking would also be based on this list)

Any IPO or public offering would only trade on the Primary Stock Market

The Secondary Stock Market could easily be adapted to allow for either sell or buy offers to be listed

EDIT: Afterthought! Instead of having Market Capitalisation in the rankings group (which should now shadow Equity anyway) why not have biggest investor list - that would give bigger players another battleground and something to do with surplus funds, making the sharemarket a much bigger part of the game.

Going back to Stoner shares - just now I was blocked from selling in one batch of Stoner, but the same company, qty and price was allowed to go on sale from a different batch. This would be fixed with my suggestions above.

FIREY:

(6) I see what you are saying here now … STONER should not be listed twice under ALL STOCKS. Every stock should only be listed once, regardless of how many stock issues have been created. I’ve posted this bug in our system, thanks.

(1) - (4) I think what you are saying here is:

(A) It would be good for ALL companies to be listed on the Stock Exchange, not just the ones that sell shares. And, I agree this is a good idea.

(B) That to avoid less committed players on the stock exchange, don’t list them until they demonstrate some commitment. BXP is a good way to gage if a player seems to be committed to play for a while, so use a limit like 3,000 as a good starting point to get on the exchange. I agree this is a good way to do it. We may need to require a small amount of equity just to make sure they don’t start negative, like maybe g2 million. And making it an achievement of sorts is a great idea too.

© We will have to identify PUBLIC and PRIVATE companies in some way. It’s easy to do since PRIVATE have not issued any shares, so showing the percentage public like you suggest is good. Note that PRIVATE companies will have 1 million shares not 2 million. PUBLIC companies will have 1 million shares plus whatever number of additional shares they issued/sold.

(D) The SHARE PRICE of private companies will be EQUITY divided by NUMBER OF SHARES. For PUBLIC companies, it will be the way we do it now, which is based on last sold price.

We will definitely implement this, all good ideas, thanks!

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We currently have an issue with tedx having issued more shares than he should be able to and I’m guessing with multiple tranches of shares it would be complex coding to keep doing the check on number of shares issued ceilings - esp when you can buy back your own shares and sell them back into the market at your convenience.

That’s a bug but would be much easier to fix as part of this implementation so I’ll add to here and get this bumped up.

PLUS: As a major shareholder in companies, I’d very much like to check how my portfolio is looking. I know there is a portfolio function but it looks nothing like a portfolio valuation that I would have IRL. I would like to see Company, number of shares held, average cost, total cost, current price, current value and profit/loss. All value columns totalled and a leader board for highest share holdings overall.

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