Erm....guys....the bushel/oil/mil markets ARE stock markets. It's no different than investing in oil in RL - you buy when it's selling low, then hold it until it's selling high. This is identical to the concept of a stock market.

gregg's idea is too much based on a lucky guess as an actual intelligent financial decision, and is really too reliant on the already established market to be worthwhile, imo.



What might be a little bit more interesting though, would be to have a "bank" option added into the game. Instead of having to buy goods/tech/mil to avoid having 2 billion cash on hand, you could choose to invest those funds into an internal bank which gives a per turn interest yield on funds in the account. It would have to be low to make sure it didn't outweigh public market investing - (%.001 or so) - but it might be a nice new dimension to the financial aspect of the game. You could also introduce a tech to increase interest yields.

I think Endrev messed around with the concept for a little while, and it seemed to work pretty well - it added another dimension to netting, and added some healthy volatility to the investment markets.