Shorting Stocks
Bet CorpShare will go down!

It'd be cool if we could short stocks, essentially borrowing a certain amount to sell at their current price and having to buy the same amount at a later date to return them. If the price dropped, you win the difference. If it rised, you lose it. It would add another way to engage with the market and make bad stocks relevant, whereas currently you only really care about stocks doing well.

I would absolutely love this, some of us have the *special* talent to only predict when a stock will go down rather than up.

One issue I see is debt. Let's say STOCK is at 10.0 per share now and you want to short it for 1000 shares. If you were to buy it normally, you'd be able to buy that with 10k in your account. But what if that stock goes up to the moon and by the time you're forced to buy, it's at 20, you'd end up with -10k in your account.

The way I could see would be to have it so that your limit is the current trading price, and going in debt pretty much locks you out of the current trading season unless you sell other shares (if you have them).

Example 1: You have 10k in your account. STOCK is trading at 10.0 and you short it for 1000 shares, which is the most you can do. It goes to 20.0 and you're forced to sell. You're now at -10k and are locked out of the current trading season. Congratulations on the pity prize.

Example 2: You have 5k in your account. 5k is locked in STOCK2. STOCK1 is trading at 10.0 and you short it for 500 shares. It goes to 15.0 and you're forced to sell. You're now at -2.5k in your account. You need to sell enough of STOCK2 to be able to trade again.

I think it'd be best to make it with a locked period. So something like a week, two weeks or 10 days or something like that. Actually implementing shorting mechanics would be too complicated given how normally the system is fairly simple to interact with, so a set duration would be best.

I think more player influenced cause and effect around CorpShare would be valuable. As it stands now, it is fairly predictable in lieu of a lack of corporate project theft.

I agree with what was stated earlier. While the corpshare shouldn't be influenced much by local happenings due to the large scale of the megacorporations in the world, I think it would make it a lot more engaging and dynamic.

Events and more involved projects with the ultimate goal to affect that. Would be interesting to see some player-driven initiative that fits in with their corporation's theme/work that leads to an increase/decrease in their corpshare. Slander campaigns, product testing, acquisition of items from specific targets. I lack the creative fiber to really come up with a lot, but you get the idea.