Stock Advice Thread (NO SPOILERS)

No, I don't have advice. I definitely need some though. Not hearing anything in the game world about stocks I should be buying.

So, what stocks should I be buying?

Don't buy life invader early in the game.

They're pretty good about giving you a heads up if something you do is gonna change the stocks.

Aside from that i have no clue, i havent really been doing alot of the stocks.

So i have decided to put stock into that insurance company below ammunation. Blow up a couple of cars and stocks will rise. Stocks are only useful when you do you first heist and have a lot to waste on properties and such.

A general tip - make your money and then GET OUT. At a certain point in the game, you're going to undertake a mission that will directly affect the price of a certain stock. Buy as much as you can before you do the mission, then watch that stock closely and sell all of it off as soon as you see a nice gain and the stock starts to level out again. I made 45% in about two hours of gameplay time and profited over $500k pretty early in the game by doing this.

I'm having trouble connecting to the Bawsaq exchange. It seems like like some, if not most, of the advice other characters give you are for stocks on that exchange. Does anyone know if it's down for maintenance or is it part of the online multiplayer coming out in a few weeks?

@mohasky: BawSaq is the market controlled by all of the people playing GTA V. If you sign up for the Rockstar Social Club and link your gamer info, it aggregates data and the market is affected by the cumulative actions of all the players. I own some Ammu-Nation stock that can only go up in a game like this, right?

Yeah i think he means that its been down, the servers for it. So its not working. I cant access it either and my gamertag is linked to it

This thread has a small list of competing companies where you can disrupt the business of one to raise the stock of the other: http://gtaforums.com/topic/594985-the-stock-exchange-information-thread-wip/

I've been planning to destroy a bunch of PostalGo mail vans and raise PostOP's stock through the roof.

UPDATE: Bawsaq became available for me. Made a killing (85% gain) from one of the big tip-offs I got. Could be that rockstars servers were getting hammered; was able to connect after midnight.

It's definitely the servers, all of the stuff that connects online, like the ifruit app to train Chop and the Social Club stat ranking things have been on and offline for the past couple days. It's a shame that it's not more consistent; as it is I'm skipping the missions that have you influence the stock market until they seem stable or I have to do them to progress the story.

Invest everything you've got, with each character, in the competitor before doing one of Franklins Lester missions (you'll know when you get there). A day or so after you'll make some serious cash.

seems to be the best trick for big bucks playing the market, just find out first what stock is going to rise from Lester then restart, switch chars and max out all investments in said stock. Ive been sitting on a stock for a couple days now and its up to 500k profit :) would be more but im playing safe till i get a feel for it.

If you are still early enough, remember the name Debonair. Invest heavy in that one. I got a return of 95% for all three characters on that one.

• When you get the assassination missions from Lester as Franklin, wait until you've completed the main storyline before doing them is a tip I've seen around. I'm inclined to agree since you can do some serious insider trading-like stuff with them and it's worth having a considerable sum of money before taking those on. (a 90% profit is better when you have $1.8M invested instead of $50,000) Additionally, purchasing property early in the game is not very useful. There's no considerable benefit in their costs being so high as their returns are not all that when you originally get them. Save that money for smaller stock trading and make small profits that way.
• You can influence competitors (as mentioned somewhere above in the posts here) and make a good gain from that. If you invest a bunch in Post-OP and then go around blowing up the trucks of its competitors, Post-OP's stock will rise and you can make a pretty penny that way.
• Same with the insurance companies. There are two (one for auto, one for people—I forget their names at the moment) and if you go around crashing cars all the time for a good bit, the auto insurance company's stock will rise. From what I've seen though, these stocks (as opposed to the mission-related stock changes) do not increase as dramatically. You'll at least be able to make a 20% profit or so if you're playing it right.
• Last bit: pay attention to the news and whatever tips you hear elsewhere in the game. If you hear a news broadcast on the radio about how Facade (the fake Microsoft/Windows company) is going through a scandal for privacy issues on their phones, then iFruit's stock will rise a bit.

That's all I've been able to figure out myself. I wish you could buy stocks faster than just mashing the A button on the crappy in-game web browser.

Hold the A button or X button on PS3 to buy a lot of stocks at once.

@microshock: I figured that must've been an option, haha. Thank you!

Also invest in Debonnaire as soon as you have a good amount of money that you want to invest. (Say, after the first heist? Or end-game, if you're patient.) I believe Debonnaire stocks early-game are somewhere around $115 (it varies per game) and will end up anywhere between $280-380 after the related assassination mission. (Which unlock after the first heist anyway)

Yeah, around the first heist you want to invest if you are doing them while playing and not post game. The Lester mission for this is the second one he gives Franklin. I waited until right before the mission, and at that time the stock in my game was at $145 or so per share. But I remember seeing it before the first Heist as being around $120 a share. Its almost something you have to know is coming and not just play on whim to make the big bucks.

And I think I will follow the advice of doing them post game to make more money. This investing 100,000- 200,000 is not giving the payoff on that high return that I wold like of investing say 5 million. Or maybe I will just wait until after a heist, get a good score and then doing one Lester mission to roll that.

I don't even know if i did the Debonaire mission. Last assassination I did was the Hotel one. I put all my money from all 3 characters into Debonaire (their stock is around 145 now).

If you did the hotel one, the first one, its your next one from him. That was when I invested also.

@microshock: late game sounds good, yeah. There's no reason to invest if you've only got petty cash. Thanks for the heads up.

I think this thread should be stickied. There are no major spoilers here and trading is an optional, but highly beneficial, way to make money. And it's a really cool feature in my opinion.

do the random encounter missions.

Stocks are pretty random throughout the game, the only for sure stock changes are either the story beats or the assassination missions previously mentioned.

I've beaten the game, and regret doing the assassin missions prior to beating the game.

Also stocks are completely random from player to player, so if someone says this stock goes to 400 after this mission, it may not go that high for you etc. For example my eCola stock in my first game stayed around 30 dollars the entire game. I just started a second game and it's started at 260 dollars.

Although Bawsaq is connected to Social Club if you get tip off in-game and invest, your share will still go up. But it only shows in your portfolio and not in the overall market (because thats the Social Club stats).
Kinda stupid to have this disconnect but its good to know you can still invest in-game tips for Bawsaq.

@hom3r: I advise putting money into the Ammu-nation stock on Bawsaq. It'll only go up with people buying guns (which they will).

DO NOT!!! Get greedy with the Lester Assassination stocks. I had the construction stock up 80% with all three characters. It had taken a while for it to go that high, but then it dropped to 30%, which sucked a giant dick.

Im getting texts from Lester that I should do his mission before doing my new story mission Burea mission (kinda the Heat mssion with the money transport) did the setups already.
Can I wait it out? Or anybody else got this?

We should get a reference list up so that we may refer to which companies represent what, so that we don't have to wade through all of the companies via in game market site to find one specific market.

i got a random encounter to drive some douche to the airport, he gave me a stock tip, i decided to gamble all my money on all my dudes on the stock, made a pretty good profit with everyone off it. was roughly a 30% profit. michael dumped 1 mil into it and came back out with 1.35 mil so yeah...

I dont remember the stock, but the dude will tell you. If you find a dude who wants a ride to the airport and wont shut up about himself, do it. You'll make some pretty significant money off it.

Any point in putting money into the studios stock (RichardMajestic?) after the premiere or does it stay at the same level?

Tried to look for a stock linked to bottled water (news story on the radio), but couldnt find one specific. (Maybe eCola or Sprunk?)

If I remember correctly, when I did this he told me to invest in Tinkle. Made a decent return on it, as well.

A random event gave me 100k stock in Animal Ark.

I beat the game and now the stock market doesn't change. Things fluctuate mildly, in small percentages, but nothing ever goes up or down on the Liberty City Stock Market. What am I supposed to do here? I've already found all of the letter scraps and do not want to start over so soon to GTA Online coming out. And I can't depend on BAWSAQ, since that is affected by other players. I don't want to lose all of my money on a wager than other players have my best interests at heart.

has it done anything for you? my stock has stayed at 0% change for quite awhile.

just recently that stock has gone up, barely. i ended up selling it for what it was worth.

Ammunation stock has gone down by 25%. I'm currently looking at a loss of 3million... but I'm not pulling out just yet. This is the first time it's gone down since launch I think.

Does the life invader stock ever go back up after that early mission, or will it stay low throughout the game? I want to buy it cheap but if it only goes up and down a few dollars as apposed to going back to the $300 before the mission ill find other things to invest in.

I was surprised when I noticed the loss earlier today. Current thinking around the net is that Ammunation would stay high because so many people would always be buying guns & ammo...evidently, this is not the case. It makes me think that BAWSAQ isn't as crowd-dependent as Rockstar is leading us to believe.

@alistercat said:

I'm hoping that it will shoot back up once GTA Online launches as I bought into it as all three characters on my 100% complete save.

Life Invader never goes back up.

I invested in Tinkle as soon as the guy at the airport told me to and the stock went down, and never came back up.

According to this thread http://www.giantbomb.com/grand-theft-auto-v/3030-36765/forums/stock-market-investments-bawsaq-1454296/#21

Invest into pisswasser as that market is always gaining profit. I have sunk in total 180 million and have seen a 4% profit.

@alistercat: ammu nation stock on Xbox is in complete free fall.I've taken a bath on the company Nearly 50% loss in 3 days I thought it was just a lull in the market too so I even doubled down after the first 150 dollar price drop. It's strange because the PS3 market has remained stagnate.so thechange doesnt jive with the world. Unless Xbox people decided to get real mother Fucking peaceful this weekend. Made me also think about what's going to happen on Oct 1 when GTA online goes live. Does anybody know how it's going to work? Are players going to have to buy all new weapons and ammo for their online character? Or will they be able to copy one of their single player characters? If its the latter we can't assume that there is going to increase in ammunations retail business and thus can't anticipate an upswing in their share prices. This investor is erring on the side of caution and suggesting that you dump any ammunations stock and reconsider any purchases your planning on doing

@propagandroid: I think I read somewhere that money does NOT carry over from sp to online. So were probably going to have to purchase everything new in online.

What should I invest in right now?

Bob Mullet. All Day, Err Day.

Pisswasser has been doing really well. I don't know how long it will last though. The growth is slowing. I made back on them what I lost from ammunation though.

Hawk and Little on Xbox platform seems to be pretty solid. Just got a decent return on a milli so in true wall street fashion I dumped another 15M into it.wish me luck!

(LCN)AUG Augury Insurance share price will double after completing final heist.

Yeah, I made 19 mil on HaL stocks after spending 25mil on it. At 64 cents a share even a small increase would be a huge gain due to the volume of stocks. I got out too early though because I sold at 1.16 and the next day it was at 5.75 on PS3. Kicking myself for not buying and holding when it spent a full week stuck at 1.00 while servers were screwy.

I've been doing decent by just looking at the graphs of individual stocks and buying anything that seems to be at the bottom of a dip. Wait a couple hours and its usually rebounded. I've also noticed a trend of things being at their highest early in the morning and immediately dropping before going back up around noon. This is all Bawsaq stocks. Which makes sense; people turn the game on in the morning, check their stocks and sell off to get their profit, causing the drop. Then as people see the low prices they buy it up.

May be a silly question but... Is there a faster way to buy stocks? as in not clicking the plus button a thousand times