The Stock Market

I now have a first version of the 18GB stock market chart. It is a one-dimensional chart without ledges, which means that shares can always fall in value. I will have rules in place to stop mindless trashing of stock prices, but companies that are unpopular or not paying dividends will always fall in value.

The values on the chart are all multiples of 10, to allow my plan of dividing all values by 10 in the final version. Some values at the low end are repeated, so that companies gain value more slowly. In the middle of the chart, values increase by as much as 30 per step, falling back to 10 at the top of the chart (so that there should be incentive to sell expensive shares and make more money on cheaper ones). The top of the chart may be too high, given that companies will have to earn their current value in order for the price to increase. Playtesting will tell.

I'm thinking of using the same chart to record company income. This would require a more fine-grained track for those parts where value increases by more than 10 per step. One approach might be to subdivide those boxes on the chart, for the purposes of tracking income. Another approach would be to make the whole chart just have steps of 10, relying on the dividend rules to increase share prices more rapidly when companies earn 100 more than their current value. I'll probably go with the graphical option rather than changing the behaviour.

This is a small but significant step forward.