It's easier with more yen. Also save scumming to avoid death from Yakuza. My character utilized the Yakuza company stock recklessly. It turns out once you can do shorts it's an easy stock to send up and down rapidly, and there is a window where the Yakuza won't kill you to work in, though it was hard to gauge. Eventually there was an investigation and my character went to jail, but the Yakuza got them out in exactly 1 day. The Yakuza company went out of business, but I had enough to buy normal stocks and push the price around by then. The Yakuza company was too small in share numbers by the time of the investigation; early on the small size was useful as it allowed the whole share allotment to be purchased and drive the price up rapidly. Later there was indeed more than enough yen and I had to get better at picking the normal stocks. It was actually a relief when the Yakuza company went away since I had reached new heights of power, and the Yakuza and police-who-don't-take-bribes were really killing off a lot of savescum alternate timelines. They were getting pretty good at it by the end, I wondered if they strongarmed the character more once the character accumulated lower ethics score which seems reasonable to assume. In at least one savescum timeline I sold off the whole company and then lined up a short and on day three the popup telling me to buy the stock or else appeared.
One thing that seems odd is that arranging purchases is limited to 99 shares per time unit. So, I click arrow to indicate I wish to purchase a stock. Merely clicking this arrow eats up time; the transaction finalization itself is instant and thus you can waste time if you click the decrease stock button instead of increase. The maximum stock allotment per click is 99 stocks. For a daily maximum the total is something over 5k stocks per day, and the same in shorts. This means it takes a few in-game days to purchase say 30k-60k shares, and then more time to buy maximum shorts on it after the repeated purchases push it upwards. Once there is enough yen, this is Super Effective though.
I did stocks normally for a while after the Yakuza corp was dissolved. I also picked up 50 real estate properties and 50 cars for stat increases that also gave achievements fwiw. I'm not sure if the cars become "classic" later and go up in value; I've seen no indication of this but it would be neat since otherwise I should sell all 50+ cars now except a pair of 5 star cars for the character to crash around in. Low quality cars on the market (not New or Perfect quality) can be bought and repaired for a profit, but it's random whether it's successful. It seems very slightly profitable unless you repair a bad quality expensive car and it fails for a few times at multi million yen cost. There is car insurance which is good because the character gets into a bad accident or two per year (and regularly receives traffic and parking citations though insurance won't cover that).
Real Estate value has changed in value exactly once after about three and half years, in a modest increase in value around year 2 and sadly before I had sunk a lot of yen into real estate. Fortunately at the near static value the difference between purchase and resale price is usually covered in about 6 months of rent, though I might be wrong or it might vary a bit since I eyeballed it twice and the other time was about 10 months. That wasn't terribly important in specifics; it wasn't a long period before gain.
After the purchase the reason Amy said this place was discounted was because someone had been killed there so it was worth less than the non-discount price would suggest. This may have been a Yakuza tip; I think the discount might happen rarely without being a result of a player choice somehow but I usually only see them from a drunk real estate guy at the bar or from a Yakuza popup event. My character lives there now since it's still the most comfortable one he owns.Other stuff with discounts are poor structural integrity (it's the 80's) and nearby pollution. Sometimes they are legit deals, and I always grab them up. They are too rare to rely on, so it took a while before I put a lot of yen into real estate since I was trying to wait for these.
I eventually was able to afford starting my own company. I could have started a small one earlier, but I opted for a moderate sized one that starts with a value of about 2 billion yen. I had an option to keep full ownership, but I chose to only maintain 71% of the initial stock. This is because the forecast at 71% retainment on investor attractiveness was "Frenzy" whereas it was nonexistant at 100% for obvious reasons. I savescummed at 100% and after the price flatlined I reloaded and at 71% it took off like... some sort of beautiful winged creature... sadly I'm not sure if I'll ever recapture the last 29% again, I'm not quite sure how to do that outside of maybe the computer actors could release them in some circumstances. That must have happened at some point because I'm at about 77% now, some must have hit market and been available for purchase without me noticing as I pushed the increase button down on the company stock before going about trades. Right now I can only claw them back one at a time. I do that before I do other trades even though it's kind of silly and probably eats up time I could use to buy another 99 stocks or something.
The character's company is in the pharma business. It has no competition listed on the market. My strategy is to purchase and cling to copyrights rather than curing new things or whatnot. I'm only putting about 3% into R&D so that makes complete sense from the sense of the game in that regard. That way I can send most of the profit to reserves to expand and hire. Maybe eventually I can have them invent new stuff, but I'll have to afford an R&D department and a 3 manager setup is 3 billion yen, 4 managers is another 10 billion... (I think that playing Stonks 9800 in this way will have an effect in costing the character, sort of like losing the fame and renown that doing probably more useful things than obtaining copyrights would otherwise bring as reflected by the game stats which make other things harder or easier to do, like I guess be trusted to have good and new ideas like the Innovation stat. I do also try to expand production and thus probably access and if things work as they should rather than as by devils wielding pitchforks, also price per unit... though that is not relevant to this game).
One thing that is tedious in this game and I wish could be automated or sped up, but helped mechanically was calling npcs on the weekends to increase friendship or relationship score or whatnot. This took forever but once I had a company I could call them up and offer them a job. Some of them were even talented right out of the box, though this doesn't matter so much because you can pay for gradually more costly stat increases. It's only like ~2 or 3 million yen done 5 or 10 times to get high stats when the company has reserves in the billions of yen, so not that big a deal. In fact, the more statistically barbaric your employees are at the start, the less wage they demand and after being trained they don't seem to be unhappy, or at least not right away, with a relatively low wage compared to a new hire with a much better application who sometime demands over 5x the wage for similar stats after training as far as I can tell. This training is likely a good deal if turnover is low, since monthly wage runs from a little under a million yen for very low stats to something outlandish like 9 million yen per month for an npc with 70%ish xp rating and high stats on their application. That sounds impressive until a player realizes that all those bars move in the positive with the training course, including xp, as detailed above.
I haven't seen any of these yet, but I wasn't paying attention. I hired most of the old employees of the Yakuza corp that was dissolved because that's who my character was calling on the weekends in those days, and they had good stats. I don't know if those guys count for the ominous yet tantalizing popup's purposes, that's about as far as I've seen about that so far.
So, at the end of the year there is a week or maybe a little more where the market pays off yearly dividends and then shortly thereafter is closed. I was doing vacations there to keep the character from stressing out and going to hospital, which is why I was catching the same fish (I think they vary by season). In this game at least, the way to do dividends is to just snap up the most valuable ones in late November and December. They'll go to the moon and you get these neat dividends besides. Thank goodness there is a dividend value per share in the company info screen or I would simply eyeball it. That way I can find the cheapest stock with good dividends at the end of the year. This is because dividends are sort of a bonus on top of the value of the stock. In this game and in my non-expert opinion, when looking at dividends the stock price doesn't matter, you look at the profits of the company instead rather than how much it's stock is worth or even if it's currently trending downward for mystery reasons if it's mild and not dramatic (before I had the power to just keep buying the stock so it's value goes up upon reflection of the large purchases). That means if a company has a good dividend percent plus can actually pay out dividends due to making profit, it's better if it's also at a cheap stock price because you can buy the shares cheaply for the dividend for the payout on dividends day, and in this game if that's the goal rather than holding you can dump them right after such as if you have shorted it and want it's value to crash from dumping the stock after collecting dividends.
Cartel is the character's own company in which the character owns 71%+ of the stock, but it's dividends percentage is low despite having made healthy profit similar to Capcon IIRC. Capcon stock number and especially percentage owned was lower, but it paid a larger percentage in dividends and had a moderate profit in the low billions or high millions, so it paid more dividends to the holder per share.
Trafficking with the Yakuza carries a sever social cost. While the character may be some sort of demigod of financial connections otherwise, the severe hit to his ethics score is quite a standout. While this is conjecture on my part, I think some things I notice may be a result of this, or I may be hallucinating this due to not knowing how it actually works in the mechanics. I've noticed that there seems to be efforts to counter my stakes (that were far more noticeable before my character was rich enough to brute force a stock up and down). Now it's more of an endurance competition when this happens. For example, I like to buy a stock with good fundamentals that seems to be undervalued. I especially like to do that when it seems to be headed up after a dip or a shakeup that doesn't impact business. Now, some mystery (in that I don't know who is doing what) computer actors seem to make an attempt to fizzle that, and I wonder what it would have been like if the character hadn't done all the Yakuza deals, but honestly it's hard to stop me I think.
Sometimes they succeed in the fizzle, but sometimes it's just there and the other computer actors must come to the conclusion that it just works day after day until the character can't make it rain on that stock anymore. After that he shorts the CRAP out of it while it sort of meanders unsure of what to do anymore (this is due to the ~5k share daily limit on transactions due to 99 per time unit or I wouldn't torture the price over time so much unless it was more effective that way, and would absolutely lay all the shorts at once instead of batches if that's possible due to circumstance). It usually starts to go down during this frame, and while this happens the short goes to maximum overdrive until price really starts to drop. After that downward trend becomes clear it's just a slaughter, it's disgusting, I both (fictionally through digital medium) loathe and love myself at the same time.
The one vulnerable point though is when I start loading up the shorts. If that stock goes up while I'm early in shorting I'm mildly boned (still holding increasing value on the stocks but losing on whatever shorts to that point, and if I think it will keep going up faster than I can sink it with sales I have to sell the shorts at a loss or they increase in cost to pay off as the value goes up, as well as costing interest as it's a loan). If ithe stock price goes down too fast as I'm laying the short I can start the slaughter before the value flees the sale, then after that's dumped, pay off the shorts and if I'm lucky and fast enough won't lose much or even end up gaining. In the first instance I'm only getting the rising stock value, and taking losses unless I bail out early. If I load up the shorts and it starts going upward right at the end as I grasp for every iota of value from that unsure which way to go stock, that's the vulnerable point. That's a reload savegame in a big situation and my character hops in his time machine and changes the timeline.