My Stock Market

Did I ever write about my stock market?

Just a Region 12 overview, as I had no picture of the stocks ;)

In my TS2 game I had a living stock market and now I have this in TS4, too! I keep track on owners, results and a possible dividend. Back in TS2 the results were based on how successful the stores were run, but now I just use a dice to decide development. When a shareowner dies, heirs get a small or big part of those shares. Change in owner structure might cause sudden challenges or conflicts between family branches, actually beyond my planning.

All this info on possessions and investments are noted in the spreadsheet where I keep track on my sims. There are several columns for their finances, which I will explain more thoroughly in a future blog post. Today it's all about stocks, so let's break it down a bit!

There are basically three categories of share companies; Community, Family, and Personal.

Community based share companies is the most common way for my individual sims to put their savings in just a few shares. There is also a small risk of losing or earn a little money. These are huge companies owning and running major community services. My Region 12 has organized services through such companies like Region 12 Energy (power supplies, serving the 50% of market that Landgraab Power is not serving), Region 12 Water (water supplies), Region 12 Green (national parks and other larger parks), Region 12 EDU (educational venues like public schools, libraries and museums), and Region 12 Transport (busses, trains, streamboats). 60% of these companies are owned by Region 12 itself, while the remaining 40% are available for trading. These companies own some of the community lots, but of course they also own "general assets" that are not defined in the game.

Remember that most worlds have decor hoods and venues that we can't even access. I don't bother with their detailed finances, I just gave them a generic sum to start with (we are of course talking a few millions), and sims owning shares own only a very small percentage of these companies. In fact, it's not allowed for a single sim to own more than 5%. These are mostly sims with a dedicated interest in specific community aspects, such as wealthy ECO friendly sims might place some savings in Region 12 Green, Inc.

Family based shares are normally "old money". Such a company has typically 2-5 owners, and controls land (community lots or residential properties for renting) or businesses (retail stores or community lots). I like these companies because they tell a family's history and make inheritance a bit more interesting. It seems wiser to pick one suitable heir for such a business, rather than spreading the shares too widely. But which heir should have shares in the family company at the cost of not inheriting the family villa? And if no heir seems to be smart and successful enough, who should operate a family's company? I normally make sure that one sim is in control of the majority, but that is not always possible, and might even cause quite interesting conflicts.

Personal based companies are small holding companies where 1 sim owns all the shares. These companies are often short lived, as they might have been founded in order to simplify the ownership of a wide group of shares, or even to make it less obvious what businesses a family or sim actually controls. There are a few grey zone businesses in my game, businesses that would prefer not to be listed in the public company registry...

So, what's the point of organizing all this? Well, in addition to the excitement added to inheritance and the possible conflicts arising between owners, these investments also swing a little when it comes to values. Every 5th simday I will use 2 dices to decide if each company's value increases or decreases, and how much. When the first dice shows 1-2 the value will fall, and 5-6 means value increases. The second dice shows how many percent the change is. So 1+4 means the company's total value decreases with 4%. 5+2 means the total value increses by 2%. In my spreadsheet this will affect all shareholders' worth directly, so I don't really need to adjust these changes on each share owning resident's file.

If you want a simple version, you could have just one or two bigger generic companies, and allow only individual share holders. You can recalculate the value how often you like, depending on how fast your community proceeds. The calculations will then get less complicated. I calculate results every simyear, but I normally take 2 RL months to complete onec year, so the stock notes feel like a rather small job.

I'd love seeing details like this added in a future pack! Meanwhile, my own system works like a clock.