Categories
Guides
How every idea in this Wiki came about, in the order it happened: from merchants buying shares in trading voyages to zero-commission apps. Open any moment to see what happened, why it made sense then, and the ideas it gave us.
⛵ 1100s → 2023
1100s–1600s
Merchants pool money to send ships, and a share of a voyage becomes a share of a company.
A merchant sailing to Alexandria or Constantinople needed money for cargo. Under a commenda contract, investors who stayed home put up the money and the travelling merchant did the work. If the ship came back, they split the profit, often three quarters to the investors and a quarter to the merchant.
If the ship sank, investors lost what they put in and nothing more. Many people could each own a slice of many voyages instead of betting everything on one.
💡 Why it made sense then
One voyage could make or ruin a family. Splitting a voyage into pieces let people share the risk, and owning pieces of several voyages spread it further.
Ideas it gave us
A share is a single unit of a company's stock. The number of shares you own divided by all shares outstanding is your percentage of ownership.
🎮 Game shares can be bought in fractions, so any amount of play money buys some. Your percentage of a listing is your shares divided by its 200,000 total.
Open the full entry →Diversification is spreading money across many different investments so a loss on one has less effect on the whole portfolio.
🎮 ETFs let you invest in a whole group of people at once.
Open the full entry →The Medici Bank opened in Florence in 1397 and grew branches from London to Rome. It moved money with bills of exchange and lent to merchants and rulers, often against pledged goods or jewels.
The Church banned usury, charging interest on a loan, so bankers built their reward into the exchange rate between currencies. Interest itself is far older: the Code of Hammurabi, around 1750 BC, already capped rates on loans of grain and silver.
💡 Why it made sense then
Trade over long distances needed credit, and lenders needed a reward for waiting and a way to get repaid if the borrower couldn't pay.
Ideas it gave us
An interest rate is the price of borrowing money, stated as a percentage of the loan per year. For savers it is the reward for lending their money to a bank.
🎮 Game savings earn a little under the Federal Reserve's published rate on reserve balances; margin loans cost more than it.
Open the full entry →Collateral is an asset a borrower pledges to a lender, which the lender can take or sell if the loan isn't repaid.
🎮 Your shares are the collateral for a margin loan, and a short sale needs collateral of 150% of the shares' value, held by the bank until you buy them back.
Open the full entry →Pacioli's Summa de arithmetica, printed in Venice in 1494, explained the double-entry method merchants used: every amount is recorded twice, as a debit and a credit, so the books balance and show what a business owns and owes.
The same book gives the rule of 72 for how long money takes to double at compound interest.
💡 Why it made sense then
Merchants with partners, agents and many voyages needed to know what they had paid for goods, what they owned and whether they were making money.
Ideas it gave us
Net worth is everything you own minus everything you owe.
🎮 Your net worth is your cash, savings, shares, options and farm plots at today's prices, minus any margin loan and short positions. The leaderboard ranks players by how much it grew this season.
Open the full entry →Cost basis is what you paid for an investment, including fees, used to work out your gain or loss when you sell.
🎮 Your portfolio shows the average cost of each position. When you sell, your gain is the sale price minus that average. A loss disallowed by the wash sale rule is added to the cost of the new shares.
Open the full entry →Compound interest is interest earned on both your original money and the interest it has already earned, so savings grow faster over time.
🎮 Savings at the bank earn interest daily, and interest earned stays in savings where it earns more, so it compounds.
Open the full entry →In the 1400s, merchants in Bruges gathered outside an inn owned by the Van der Beurze family to trade bills and goods, which gave the word "bourse" to exchanges across Europe.
In 1531 Antwerp opened a building designed for trading, where merchants from many countries met every day.
💡 Why it made sense then
Putting buyers and sellers in one place at one time made it easier to find a trade and to see what things were worth.
Ideas it gave us
A stock exchange is a regulated marketplace where buyers and sellers trade shares, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or Nasdaq.
🎮 The whole game is one small exchange: every listing trades there, prices come only from player trades, and the 📈 Stock exchange in the city is where the market lives.
Open the full entry →In 1553 a group of London merchants pooled money to send ships looking for a northeast passage to Asia. Instead of funding one trip, investors bought shares in a company, later chartered as the Muscovy Company, that would run many trips.
💡 Why it made sense then
Long, expensive expeditions needed more money than a few partners had, and a lasting company could keep going after a single voyage failed.
Ideas it gave us
A stock is a unit of ownership in a company. Owning stock gives you a share of the company's value and, usually, a vote and a claim on its profits.
🎮 In Journey Shares, each listed public figure has 200,000 play-money shares you can buy and sell, priced by supply and demand.
Open the full entry →In 1602 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) let anyone in the Dutch Republic subscribe for shares, raising about 6.4 million guilders from over a thousand investors. It's often called the first public offering.
The capital was permanent: investors couldn't take their money out after a voyage, so they sold their shares to someone else instead, and a market in them grew in Amsterdam. The company paid its first dividend in 1610, partly in spices.
💡 Why it made sense then
Trading with Asia took years and huge fleets. Permanent capital let the company plan for the long term, and a place to sell shares let investors get out without the company paying them back.
🎮 In Journey Shares
Listing someone in Journey Shares is the game's public offering: the first buyers get the lowest prices, and the player who listed them earns 1% of every buy in the first week.
Ideas it gave us
An IPO is the first time a company sells shares to the public, after which its stock trades on an exchange.
🎮 Listing someone is the game's IPO. The player who lists them earns an underwriting fee of 1% of every buy in the first week.
Open the full entry →A share is a single unit of a company's stock. The number of shares you own divided by all shares outstanding is your percentage of ownership.
🎮 Game shares can be bought in fractions, so any amount of play money buys some. Your percentage of a listing is your shares divided by its 200,000 total.
Open the full entry →Shares outstanding are all the shares of a company currently held by investors. The float is the part of them that's free to trade publicly.
🎮 Each listing has 200,000 shares: 100,000 trade on the public pool and 100,000 are held in escrow for the person, released only if they claim their profile.
Open the full entry →A dividend is a cash payment a company makes to its shareholders out of its profits, usually every quarter.
🎮 Game listings don't pay dividends. The nearest thing is a farm plot from the 🌾 Farm co-op in the city: it pays a harvest every day, which is taxed as income, like a dividend.
Open the full entry →A stock exchange is a regulated marketplace where buyers and sellers trade shares, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or Nasdaq.
🎮 The whole game is one small exchange: every listing trades there, prices come only from player trades, and the 📈 Stock exchange in the city is where the market lives.
Open the full entry →A stock is a unit of ownership in a company. Owning stock gives you a share of the company's value and, usually, a vote and a claim on its profits.
🎮 In Journey Shares, each listed public figure has 200,000 play-money shares you can buy and sell, priced by supply and demand.
Open the full entry →1600s–1790s
Shares trade in coffee houses and bourses, the first bubbles burst, and governments borrow from the public.
Isaac Le Maire, a former VOC director, sold VOC shares he didn't yet have, planning to deliver them later at a lower price. As the price fell, shareholders complained.
In 1610 the authorities banned the practice, the first known rule against short selling.
💡 Why it made sense then
If you believe a price is too high, selling now and buying later is the way to act on it. Those who own the shares see it as an attack, which is why short selling has been argued over ever since.
🎮 In Journey Shares
You can short any listing through the game's bank, with 150% collateral.
Ideas it gave us
Short selling is borrowing shares, selling them, and buying them back later, to profit if the price falls.
🎮 Short any person through the bank once your account is big enough, with 150% collateral like real brokers require.
Open the full entry →Rare tulip bulbs became fashionable, and people traded contracts for bulbs still in the ground, often in taverns. Prices rose steeply through the winter of 1636, then collapsed in February 1637.
Historians still debate how much damage it did, but it became the classic story of a speculative bubble.
💡 Why it made sense then
When prices keep rising, buying to resell looks easy money. It works until there's no one left to buy.
Ideas it gave us
A market bubble is when prices rise far above any reasonable measure of value because buyers expect to sell to someone else at a higher price, until confidence breaks and prices crash.
🎮 Listings can bubble: a rush of buying after news pushes a price far above where it settles once the excitement fades.
Open the full entry →In the mid-1600s, London merchants left gold with goldsmiths for safekeeping and got receipts that began to change hands like money.
Goldsmiths noticed that depositors rarely all came back at once, so they lent part of the gold out at interest and kept the rest in reserve.
💡 Why it made sense then
Gold sitting in a vault earned nothing. Lending most of it out was profitable, as long as not everyone asked for their money on the same day.
Ideas it gave us
Fractional reserve banking is the system in which banks keep only part of their deposits as cash reserves and lend out the rest, which creates new money in the economy.
🎮 The game's bank lends out part of what savers deposit, like a real bank, and keeps the rest at the Federal Reserve.
Open the full entry →Confusion of Confusions, written by Joseph de la Vega in 1688, is the oldest known book about stock trading. It describes the Amsterdam market in VOC shares, its rumours, panics and tricks.
It also describes options: paying a premium now for the right to buy or sell shares at a set price by a set date, so a trader could limit a loss to that premium.
💡 Why it made sense then
Traders wanted to bet on a price or protect against a move without putting up the full price of the shares.
Ideas it gave us
A call option is a contract that gives its buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy a stock at a set price (the strike) before or at a set date. Buyers profit when the stock rises above the strike by more than the premium paid.
🎮 Once enough shares have traded, each profile gets calls and puts at set strikes, expiring on Fridays, settled in play money.
Open the full entry →A put option is a contract that gives its buyer the right to sell a stock at a set price (the strike) before or at a set date. Buyers profit when the stock falls below the strike by more than the premium paid.
🎮 Puts on a person pay out if their share price ends below the strike at Friday's expiry.
Open the full entry →The strike price is the fixed price at which an option lets its holder buy (for a call) or sell (for a put) the underlying stock.
🎮 Each profile's option chain offers calls and puts at set strikes around the current price.
Open the full entry →An option's premium is the price paid to buy it. It is made of intrinsic value (what it would pay if exercised now) plus time value (the chance it becomes worth more before expiry).
🎮 The premium is the price shown for each contract, per share, on a profile's options panel. It comes from Black-Scholes and rises as more players buy the same contract.
Open the full entry →An option's expiration date is the last day it can be used. After it, the option either pays out its intrinsic value or expires worthless.
🎮 Game options expire on Fridays: two weekly expiries and one monthly, settled against the 24-hour average share price.
Open the full entry →To pay for war with France, the English government borrowed £1.2 million from investors who formed the Bank of England in 1694. The government paid them interest year after year.
Government debt became something investors could hold for steady income and sell to others, the ancestor of today's government bonds.
💡 Why it made sense then
Governments needed large sums quickly, and lenders wanted a safe, regular income they could sell if they needed their money back.
Ideas it gave us
A bond is a loan to a government or company that pays the lender interest (the coupon) and returns the full amount (the face value) at a set date.
🎮 The game has no bonds. The nearest thing is savings at the bank, which pays a steady rate tied to the Federal Reserve's.
Open the full entry →Yield is the income an investment pays each year as a percentage of its price, such as a bond's interest or a stock's dividends.
🎮 Savings at the bank have a yield, shown as a yearly rate, and farm plots pay a daily harvest that works out as a yield on what you paid for them.
Open the full entry →In London's Exchange Alley, a trader who sold shares he didn't own was said to sell the bearskin before catching the bear, and short sellers became "bears". Buyers who pushed prices up became "bulls".
💡 Why it made sense then
Markets have always needed quick words for the two sides of a bet.
Ideas it gave us
A bear market is a long period of falling prices, usually a drop of 20% or more from a recent high. Being bearish means expecting prices to fall.
🎮 When prices across the game fall together, it's a bear market. You can profit from falls by short selling at the bank or buying puts. The city's 🐻 bear market parade is only for show.
Open the full entry →A bull market is a long period of rising prices, often defined as a 20% rise from a recent low. Being bullish means expecting prices to go up.
🎮 When most listings rise together, the whole game is in a bull market. The city also stages a 🐂 bull run through downtown from time to time, just for fun.
Open the full entry →In 1720 shares in Britain's South Sea Company and France's Mississippi Company rose many times over on promises of trade profits, then crashed. Isaac Newton is said to have lost heavily.
Britain's Bubble Act of 1720 restricted new joint-stock companies without a royal charter for over a century.
💡 Why it made sense then
Easy credit, new ways to buy shares and stories of fortunes drew in people who didn't know what the companies were worth.
Ideas it gave us
A market bubble is when prices rise far above any reasonable measure of value because buyers expect to sell to someone else at a higher price, until confidence breaks and prices crash.
🎮 Listings can bubble: a rush of buying after news pushes a price far above where it settles once the excitement fades.
Open the full entry →Information asymmetry is when one side of a deal knows more than the other. It can cause adverse selection, where bad products or risks drive out good ones.
🎮 The house bots use only public information: prices, moves, trade counts and vouches. They never see your trades before they happen.
Open the full entry →1770s–1920s
Thinkers explain prices, trade and competition, while the telegraph and the ticker speed markets up.
Adam Smith described a pin factory where ten workers, each doing one step, made about 48,000 pins a day, far more than they could alone. He argued that prices set by competition guide people to produce what others want.
💡 Why it made sense then
Trade and industry were growing fast, and people wanted to understand what made some nations richer than others.
Ideas it gave us
Economies of scale are the cost savings a business gets as it grows: the average cost of each unit falls as it produces more.
🎮 The game has no firms, but you can see the opposite on a curve: the more you buy at once, the higher your average price.
Open the full entry →Supply and demand is the model that explains prices: when more people want something than is available, its price rises; when more is available than people want, its price falls.
🎮 Every Journey Shares price is set by supply and demand through a bonding curve: buying raises the price and selling lowers it.
Open the full entry →Perfect competition is a market with many sellers of an identical product, free entry and exit, and full information, so no one firm can set the price. Every firm is a price taker.
🎮 The game's curves make every player a price taker: no one sets the price, and anyone can trade at the quote.
Open the full entry →In 1815, during debates over the Corn Laws, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Edward West and Robert Torrens all set out the law of diminishing returns: adding more labour to the same land adds less and less grain.
💡 Why it made sense then
A growing population had to be fed from limited farmland, so how much more food extra work would bring was an urgent question.
Ideas it gave us
Diminishing returns means that adding more of one input, while others stay fixed, eventually adds less and less output. A tenth worker in a small kitchen adds less than the second.
🎮 The farm co-op limits how many plots you can own, and bigger orders on a listing's curve get less per dollar, both showing diminishing returns.
Open the full entry →In his 1817 book, David Ricardo showed that even if Portugal made both cloth and wine more cheaply than England, both countries gain if each makes what it gives up least to produce, and they trade.
💡 Why it made sense then
Britain was arguing over free trade, and Ricardo showed trade helps both sides even when one is better at everything.
Ideas it gave us
Comparative advantage is the ability to produce something at a lower opportunity cost than someone else. Trade makes both sides better off when each specialises in what they give up least to make.
🎮 Hiring a bot you've beaten is a small lesson in trade: it trades while you do other things, and you split the result.
Open the full entry →French mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot wrote the first mathematical models of monopoly and of a market shared by two producers, each choosing how much to make while guessing what the other will do.
💡 Why it made sense then
Many real markets had only a few big sellers, and their behaviour couldn't be explained by pure competition.
Ideas it gave us
An oligopoly is a market dominated by a few large firms, each of which must consider how the others will react. Airlines, wireless carriers and cloud computing are examples.
🎮 When a few large players hold most of a listing, they act like an oligopoly: each one's buying and selling moves the price for everyone. Whale alerts show when someone passes a big share.
Open the full entry →A monopoly is a market with a single seller and no close substitutes, which lets it set a higher price and sell less than a competitive market would, creating deadweight loss.
🎮 Each listing's pool is the only place to trade that person, a kind of monopoly, but its prices are set by a fixed curve, not by a seller choosing them.
Open the full entry →Jules Dupuit, a French engineer, asked how much a public bridge was worth to its users. He saw that many would pay more than the toll, and that a high toll stopped some crossings that were worth making, a loss nobody gains.
💡 Why it made sense then
The French state was building roads, canals and bridges and needed a way to judge them and set tolls.
Ideas it gave us
Consumer surplus is the difference between what buyers would be willing to pay and what they actually pay. Producer surplus is the difference between what sellers receive and the lowest price they'd accept.
🎮 When you'd happily pay more for store gear than its price, the difference is your consumer surplus.
Open the full entry →Deadweight loss is the value lost to society when a market produces less (or more) than the efficient quantity, often because of a tax, price control or monopoly. It's surplus that no one gets.
🎮 The game's 7.53% sales tax on store items creates a small deadweight loss: some purchases that would just be worth it without the tax don't happen.
Open the full entry →The stock ticker, introduced in 1867, sent prices by telegraph and printed them on paper tape in brokers' offices. Company names were shortened to a few letters to save time: ticker symbols.
💡 Why it made sense then
Prices used to travel by runner. The telegraph let traders far from the exchange see prices within minutes.
Ideas it gave us
A ticker symbol is the short code of letters used to identify a stock on an exchange, like AAPL for Apple or TSLA for Tesla.
🎮 Every listed person has a ticker too, 2 to 5 capital letters, unique across the game, like $HSN for Hasan Piker.
Open the full entry →A real-time quote is a stock's current price as trades happen, as opposed to a delayed quote that lags by 15 to 20 minutes.
🎮 Prices, moves and market caps in the game update live as players trade.
Open the full entry →In 1871 William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger, and in 1874 Léon Walras, each argued that value comes from the satisfaction of one more unit, which falls as you have more. Walras also described how all markets settle into balance together.
💡 Why it made sense then
It solved an old puzzle: why water, essential to life, is cheap while diamonds are expensive.
Ideas it gave us
Marginal utility is the extra satisfaction from one more unit of something. It usually falls with each unit, which is called diminishing marginal utility.
🎮 Store gear shows diminishing marginal utility: the first car or pet is fun, the fifth adds much less.
Open the full entry →Marginal cost is the cost of producing one more unit. Firms maximise profit by producing until marginal cost equals marginal revenue.
🎮 When you buy on a bonding curve, the marginal cost of each extra share rises, which is why the last share in a big order costs more than the first.
Open the full entry →Market equilibrium is the price at which the quantity buyers want equals the quantity sellers offer, so there's no shortage or surplus.
🎮 On a bonding curve the price settles wherever buying and selling balance out: when nobody wants to buy or sell at the current price, it stops moving.
Open the full entry →From the 1870s, New York Stock Exchange specialists stood at one post and handled one stock. They kept a book of customers' orders to buy or sell at set prices, including orders to sell if the price fell to a level, and filled orders to buy or sell at once from it.
They were expected to trade themselves to keep the market orderly when buyers or sellers were scarce.
💡 Why it made sense then
As trading grew, someone had to match orders that arrived at different times and keep a price available.
Ideas it gave us
An order book is the live list of buy and sell orders waiting at each price for a stock.
🎮 The game has no order book. Each listing's curve plays its part, and the quote on every profile shows how much you could buy or sell near the current price (the depth).
Open the full entry →A limit order buys or sells only at a set price or better, so you control the price but it may never fill.
🎮 Price-point orders let you invest on a dip or take profit when a person hits a price you choose.
Open the full entry →A market order buys or sells straight away at the best price available, trading certainty of filling for certainty of price.
🎮 Every buy or sell you place on a profile is a market order: it fills at once along the curve. Share orders are protected, so the fill can't be more than 2% worse than the price you saw.
Open the full entry →A stop-loss order sells automatically once a stock falls to a set price, to cap how much you can lose.
🎮 Set a price-point order to sell if a person drops to your stop price.
Open the full entry →Liquidity is how easily something can be bought or sold quickly without moving its price much.
🎮 Every listing is liquid in the sense that the curve always trades, but a quiet listing moves more per dollar. Market cap and depth on the quote tell you how much a trade will shift the price.
Open the full entry →Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics (1890) showed price set where supply and demand meet, like the two blades of scissors, and measured how sensitive demand is to price: elasticity.
💡 Why it made sense then
Economics was becoming a university subject, and it needed clear tools to explain everyday prices.
Ideas it gave us
Supply and demand is the model that explains prices: when more people want something than is available, its price rises; when more is available than people want, its price falls.
🎮 Every Journey Shares price is set by supply and demand through a bonding curve: buying raises the price and selling lowers it.
Open the full entry →Price elasticity of demand measures how much the quantity people buy changes when the price changes. Demand is elastic if quantity changes by a bigger percentage than price, and inelastic if it changes by less.
🎮 Store prices in the city are fixed, but you can see elasticity in how players respond: a small price change on some listings brings a rush of trades, while others barely react.
Open the full entry →Market equilibrium is the price at which the quantity buyers want equals the quantity sellers offer, so there's no shortage or surplus.
🎮 On a bonding curve the price settles wherever buying and selling balance out: when nobody wants to buy or sell at the current price, it stops moving.
Open the full entry →The Sherman Act of 1890 made it illegal to monopolize trade or conspire to restrain it. In 1911 the Supreme Court used it to break up Standard Oil into 34 companies.
💡 Why it made sense then
Giant trusts controlled oil, railways and sugar, and farmers and small businesses blamed them for high prices.
Ideas it gave us
A monopoly is a market with a single seller and no close substitutes, which lets it set a higher price and sell less than a competitive market would, creating deadweight loss.
🎮 Each listing's pool is the only place to trade that person, a kind of monopoly, but its prices are set by a fixed curve, not by a seller choosing them.
Open the full entry →On 26 May 1896, Charles Dow published an average of 12 industrial companies' share prices. One number could now sum up how the market was doing.
💡 Why it made sense then
Investors wanted a quick way to see whether the market as a whole was rising or falling.
Ideas it gave us
A market index is a number that tracks the combined price of a set group of stocks, such as the S&P 500 (500 large US companies), to show how that part of the market is doing.
🎮 Each game ETF is also an index of its group: its price tells you how that set of people is doing overall.
Open the full entry →In his 1900 thesis, The Theory of Speculation, French mathematician Louis Bachelier modelled price changes as random and used it to value options on the Paris Bourse. His work was largely ignored for half a century.
💡 Why it made sense then
Paris had an active options market, and Bachelier wanted a scientific way to price its contracts.
Ideas it gave us
Volatility measures how much and how quickly a price moves up and down, usually as the annualized standard deviation of its returns.
🎮 Each person's option prices use their own measured volatility.
Open the full entry →After the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913, Congress passed an income tax with a 1% rate and extra rates on higher incomes, reaching 7% on income over $500,000. Each rate applied only to income within its band.
💡 Why it made sense then
The government wanted revenue that rose with ability to pay, rather than relying on tariffs that fell on everyone's purchases.
Ideas it gave us
A tax bracket is a range of income taxed at one rate. Under a progressive system each rate applies only to the income inside its bracket, so moving into a higher bracket never lowers your take-home pay.
🎮 The game uses two flat rates instead of brackets: 22% on income and short-term gains, and 15% on longer-term gains, after the weekly tax-free amount.
Open the full entry →In the Panic of 1907, bank runs spread until financier J. P. Morgan organized a rescue. To avoid depending on one man again, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in December 1913.
The Fed could lend to banks in a crisis and influence how much money and credit flowed through the economy.
💡 Why it made sense then
Panics kept recurring, and the country had no lender of last resort.
Ideas it gave us
Monetary policy is how a central bank manages interest rates and the money supply to keep inflation low and employment high. Raising rates cools the economy; cutting them stimulates it.
🎮 The game's bank rates follow the real Fed, so real monetary policy changes game savings and loan costs.
Open the full entry →Austrian economist Friedrich von Wieser argued that the true cost of using something is the value of the best other use it had, an idea soon called opportunity cost.
💡 Why it made sense then
It explained costs even where no money changes hands, like the time you spend.
Ideas it gave us
Opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative you give up when you make a choice. The real cost of anything is what you could have had instead.
🎮 Uninvested cash in the game slowly loses value to inflation, which makes its opportunity cost visible.
Open the full entry →Prices rose sharply during World War I. In 1919 the Bureau of Labor Statistics began publishing a cost-of-living index for US cities, the start of today's Consumer Price Index.
💡 Why it made sense then
Workers and employers needed a fair way to adjust wages as prices rose.
Ideas it gave us
The consumer price index tracks the price of a fixed basket of goods and services that households buy. Its percentage change over a year is the most quoted measure of inflation.
🎮 The game takes the real US CPI inflation rate and applies it daily to uninvested cash.
Open the full entry →Inflation is the rate at which prices across the economy rise over time, so each dollar buys less. The US Federal Reserve targets 2% a year.
🎮 Once a day, uninvested cash in the game loses value at the real US inflation rate (CPI). Invested money isn't affected.
Open the full entry →In The Economics of Welfare (1920), Arthur Pigou described costs that fall on people outside a deal, such as smoke from a factory, and proposed taxing the activity by the harm it does.
💡 Why it made sense then
Industrial cities were polluted, and markets alone gave factories no reason to count the damage.
Ideas it gave us
An externality is a cost or benefit that falls on people outside a transaction. Pollution is a negative externality; vaccination, which protects others, is a positive one.
🎮 Your trades affect everyone holding the same person: a big sale lowers their value. That's a small externality.
Open the full entry →The Revenue Act of 1921 taxed gains on assets held over two years at 12.5%, below the top income tax rate. The same year, Congress stopped investors claiming a loss when they sold and quickly bought the same shares back: the wash sale rule.
Laws of the same years first let losses carry over to reduce tax in later years. Today US investors can use up to $3,000 a year of net losses against other income, a limit set in 1978, and carry the rest forward.
💡 Why it made sense then
High wartime tax rates made people hold on to investments rather than sell, and some sold at a loss only on paper to cut their tax.
Ideas it gave us
Capital gains tax is tax on the profit from selling an investment for more than you paid. In the US, gains on assets held over a year are taxed at lower long-term rates (0%, 15% or 20%) than short-term gains, which are taxed as income.
🎮 Game gains on shares held a week or less are taxed at 22%, longer holds at 15%, on a weekly tax year.
Open the full entry →A capital gain is the profit from selling an investment for more than you paid for it; selling for less is a capital loss.
🎮 Gains are taxed on a weekly tax year: holds of a week or less at 22%, longer at 15%.
Open the full entry →The wash sale rule stops you from claiming a tax loss if you buy the same or a substantially identical investment within 30 days before or after selling it at a loss. The loss is added to the new shares' cost basis instead.
🎮 The game applies the wash sale rule with a window of about 14 hours either way, the real 30 days scaled to a one-week tax year.
Open the full entry →A tax loss carryforward lets you use an investment loss you couldn't use this year to cut your taxes in later years.
🎮 Losses cancel gains within the week. Up to $57.69 a week of a net loss reduces your taxable income (the real $3,000 a year spread over 52 weeks), and the rest carries forward to later weeks.
Open the full entry →Massachusetts Investors Trust opened in Boston in 1924. Anyone could buy in or cash out at the value of its holdings, giving small savers a share of a professionally chosen portfolio.
💡 Why it made sense then
Buying many different stocks cost more than most people could afford, and pooling money solved that.
Ideas it gave us
A mutual fund pools money from many investors to buy a portfolio chosen by a manager. Shares are bought and sold once a day at the fund's net asset value.
🎮 The game has no mutual funds, only ETFs, which trade any time at their live price.
Open the full entry →1929–1950s
The Great Depression leads to deposit insurance, securities law, margin rules and modern economic statistics.
In the late 1920s, many investors bought shares with as little as 10% of their own money, borrowing the rest. When prices fell in October 1929, brokers demanded more cash, and those who couldn't pay were sold out, pushing prices lower still. On Black Tuesday, 29 October, the market plunged.
💡 Why it made sense then
Borrowing made gains look easy while prices rose; the same leverage made the fall far worse.
🎮 In Journey Shares
The game's bank lends up to half of what your stocks are worth and sells them automatically if your own stake falls below 25%.
Ideas it gave us
Buying on margin means borrowing money from your broker to buy more stock than your cash alone allows, using your investments as collateral.
🎮 The bank lends for margin buys under Reg T, with a margin call if your own stake falls below 25%.
Open the full entry →A margin call is a demand from your broker to add cash or sell investments because your own stake in a margin account has fallen below the required minimum.
🎮 If your own stake in your stocks falls below 25%, the bank sells shares to pay down your loan automatically. If selling doesn't cover it, the bank writes off the rest.
Open the full entry →Leverage is using borrowed money to increase the size of an investment, which magnifies both gains and losses.
🎮 Borrowing on margin at the bank is leverage: with half borrowed, a 10% move in your shares is about a 20% move in your own money, up or down.
Open the full entry →From 1929 to 1933, US output collapsed and prices fell by roughly a quarter. Waves of bank runs closed thousands of banks, and unemployment reached about 25% in 1933.
Falling prices made debts harder to repay, which led to more defaults and more failures.
💡 Why it made sense then
It showed how panics, falling prices and bank failures can feed on each other, and it shaped the rules that followed.
Ideas it gave us
Deflation is a sustained fall in the general price level. It sounds good, but it can make people delay spending and make debts harder to pay, which deepens downturns.
🎮 Game prices never deflate automatically; only falling demand pushes listings down.
Open the full entry →A bank run happens when many depositors withdraw their money at once because they fear the bank will fail, which can make it fail even if it was sound.
🎮 The game's bank can fail if losses on its loans wipe out its capital. Savings are insured only up to $25,000, so large savers have reason to worry when losses grow.
Open the full entry →A recession is a significant, widespread fall in economic activity that lasts more than a few months. A common rule of thumb is two quarters in a row of falling real GDP.
🎮 The game has no recessions, but a long slide in most listings, or a bank failure, feels much the same: prices fall and loans are called in.
Open the full entry →The unemployment rate is the share of people in the labour force who don't have a job but are looking for one. People not looking aren't counted.
🎮 The game has no jobs, but the bot agency lets you hire a bot you've beaten to trade for you for a week.
Open the full entry →With property taxes going unpaid in the Depression, Mississippi adopted a 2% general retail sales tax in 1932, the first modern one in the US. Within a decade, about half of the states had followed.
💡 Why it made sense then
States needed money that kept coming in when incomes and property values had fallen, and a small charge on every purchase did that.
🎮 In Journey Shares
Everything in the city's stores includes 7.53% sales tax, which goes to the treasury.
Ideas it gave us
A sales tax is a tax added to the price of goods and services when they're sold. The seller collects it and pays it to the government.
🎮 Everything sold in the city's stores includes 7.53% sales tax, the average combined US state and local rate. It goes to the treasury.
Open the full entry →The Banking Act of 1933, often called Glass-Steagall, created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and separated commercial from investment banking. From 1934, deposits were insured up to $2,500.
💡 Why it made sense then
If depositors know they'll be repaid, they have no reason to run. Critics warned that insured banks might take more risk.
🎮 In Journey Shares
Savings at the game's bank are insured up to $25,000.
Ideas it gave us
Deposit insurance guarantees that savers get their money back, up to a limit, if their bank fails. In the US the FDIC insures up to $250,000 per depositor, per bank.
🎮 Savings at the game's bank are insured up to $25,000. If the bank fails, savings above that can lose part of their value.
Open the full entry →A bank run happens when many depositors withdraw their money at once because they fear the bank will fail, which can make it fail even if it was sound.
🎮 The game's bank can fail if losses on its loans wipe out its capital. Savings are insured only up to $25,000, so large savers have reason to worry when losses grow.
Open the full entry →Moral hazard is the tendency to take more risk when someone else bears the cost if things go wrong, such as a bank expecting a bailout or a driver who is fully insured.
🎮 The game's bank is bailed out when it fails, which shows the moral hazard: every rescue adds new money and leaves the same rules in place.
Open the full entry →The Securities Act of 1933 made companies publish a prospectus before selling shares to the public and held underwriters responsible for its accuracy. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 created the Securities and Exchange Commission and gave the Federal Reserve power to limit borrowing to buy stock.
💡 Why it made sense then
In the 1920s buyers often knew far less than sellers. The laws aimed to put the facts in front of every investor and to curb the borrowing behind the crash.
Ideas it gave us
An underwriter is the investment bank that manages a new stock or bond issue, pricing it and selling it to investors in return for a fee.
🎮 The player who lists someone acts as their underwriter: they earn 1% of every buy in the listing's first week, paid by buyers on top of the price. Listings the game itself creates pay nobody.
Open the full entry →Information asymmetry is when one side of a deal knows more than the other. It can cause adverse selection, where bad products or risks drive out good ones.
🎮 The house bots use only public information: prices, moves, trade counts and vouches. They never see your trades before they happen.
Open the full entry →Buying on margin means borrowing money from your broker to buy more stock than your cash alone allows, using your investments as collateral.
🎮 The bank lends for margin buys under Reg T, with a margin call if your own stake falls below 25%.
Open the full entry →Security Analysis (1934) taught investors to judge a stock by its earnings, assets and price, rather than by tips and momentum. Comparing a price with earnings per share became a standard yardstick.
💡 Why it made sense then
After the crash, investors wanted a disciplined way to tell a bargain from a bubble.
Ideas it gave us
The price-to-earnings ratio is a stock's price divided by its earnings per share, showing how much investors pay for each dollar of profit.
🎮 Listed people have no earnings, so the game has no P/E ratio. Prices come purely from supply and demand, which is why a person's popularity and news move them.
Open the full entry →In 1934 economist Simon Kuznets presented estimates of US national income to Congress, the basis of what became gross domestic product.
💡 Why it made sense then
In the Depression, lawmakers had no reliable number for how much the economy had shrunk.
Ideas it gave us
GDP is the total market value of all final goods and services produced in a country in a period. It is the main measure of the size of an economy and how fast it's growing.
🎮 The game has no GDP. Its closest measure of activity is trading volume, shown on the stats page.
Open the full entry →The Banking Act of 1935 set up the Federal Open Market Committee, which decides how the Fed buys and sells securities. In time it came to steer the overnight rate banks charge each other: the federal funds rate.
💡 Why it made sense then
Monetary policy needed one body making decisions for the whole country.
Ideas it gave us
The federal funds rate is the interest rate at which US banks lend reserves to each other overnight. The Federal Reserve sets a target range for it, and it drives borrowing costs across the economy.
🎮 The game's savings and margin rates follow the Fed's interest rate on reserve balances, which moves with the federal funds rate.
Open the full entry →Monetary policy is how a central bank manages interest rates and the money supply to keep inflation low and employment high. Raising rates cools the economy; cutting them stimulates it.
🎮 The game's bank rates follow the real Fed, so real monetary policy changes game savings and loan costs.
Open the full entry →In The General Theory (1936), Keynes argued that economies can get stuck with high unemployment and that government spending can lift demand. He also explained why people prefer to hold cash in uncertain times.
💡 Why it made sense then
Years of depression had shaken the belief that markets always recover quickly on their own.
Ideas it gave us
Fiscal policy is the government's use of spending and taxes to influence the economy. Spending more or taxing less stimulates growth; the reverse cools it.
🎮 Game taxes go to a public treasury that pays for bank bailouts before any new money is printed.
Open the full entry →Liquidity is how easily something can be bought or sold quickly without moving its price much.
🎮 Every listing is liquid in the sense that the curve always trades, but a quiet listing moves more per dollar. Market cap and depth on the quote tell you how much a trade will shift the price.
Open the full entry →Starting in 1940, a monthly survey of households asked who was working and who was looking for work. It became the source of the official US unemployment rate.
💡 Why it made sense then
During the Depression, estimates of joblessness varied wildly, and policy needed a reliable figure.
Ideas it gave us
The unemployment rate is the share of people in the labour force who don't have a job but are looking for one. People not looking aren't counted.
🎮 The game has no jobs, but the bot agency lets you hire a bot you've beaten to trade for you for a week.
Open the full entry →Their 1944 book treated economic choices as strategic games, where each player's best move depends on what others do.
💡 Why it made sense then
Many decisions, from pricing to war, depend on predicting a rival's response.
Ideas it gave us
Game theory is the study of strategic decisions, where each player's best choice depends on what the others do. The prisoner's dilemma is its most famous example.
🎮 Trading is a game in this sense: whether to buy depends on what you expect others to do. The weekly challenge against a bot is a head-to-head game too.
Open the full entry →With far more people paying income tax during World War II, the Individual Income Tax Act of 1944 introduced the standard deduction, so most filers didn't need to itemize.
💡 Why it made sense then
Millions of new taxpayers needed a simple way to file.
Ideas it gave us
The standard deduction is a fixed amount of income that isn't taxed at all. Taxpayers take it or itemise their deductions, whichever is larger.
🎮 The first $309.62 a week is tax-free in the game, the real US $16,100 standard deduction spread over 52 weeks.
Open the full entry →Measuring Business Cycles (1946), from the National Bureau of Economic Research, dated the ups and downs of the US economy. The NBER still dates official US recessions.
💡 Why it made sense then
Understanding booms and busts required first agreeing when they started and ended.
Ideas it gave us
The market cycle is the repeating pattern of expansion, peak, contraction and recovery in prices and in the wider economy.
🎮 Listings go through their own cycles: a rush of buying when someone is in the news, a peak, a slide as holders sell, and sometimes a recovery.
Open the full entry →A recession is a significant, widespread fall in economic activity that lasts more than a few months. A common rule of thumb is two quarters in a row of falling real GDP.
🎮 The game has no recessions, but a long slide in most listings, or a bank failure, feels much the same: prices fall and loans are called in.
Open the full entry →Graham's book for ordinary investors (1949) described "Mr. Market", a moody partner offering prices every day, and recommended investing the same amount at regular intervals.
💡 Why it made sense then
Most people can't time the market, so a steady habit protects them from buying only when prices are high.
Ideas it gave us
Dollar-cost averaging means investing the same amount at regular intervals, whatever the price, so you buy more shares when prices are low and fewer when they're high.
🎮 You can dollar-cost average in the game by buying the same amount of a person or ETF every day, for example with your daily bonus.
Open the full entry →1950s–1990s
Risk gets measured, options get a formula, and index funds and ETFs bring the whole market to everyone.
In 1950 John Nash proved that games have an equilibrium where no player gains by changing strategy alone. The same year, researchers at RAND devised the prisoner's dilemma.
💡 Why it made sense then
It gave a way to predict outcomes when every side is reacting to the others.
Ideas it gave us
A Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies in which no player can do better by changing their own strategy while the others keep theirs. It's the stable outcome of a game.
🎮 When no player can gain by trading a listing differently given what everyone else is doing, its price settles: a small Nash equilibrium.
Open the full entry →Game theory is the study of strategic decisions, where each player's best choice depends on what the others do. The prisoner's dilemma is its most famous example.
🎮 Trading is a game in this sense: whether to buy depends on what you expect others to do. The weekly challenge against a bot is a head-to-head game too.
Open the full entry →In "Portfolio Selection" (1952), Harry Markowitz measured risk as the spread of returns and showed that combining investments that don't move together lowers risk for the same expected return.
💡 Why it made sense then
Investors already said "don't put all your eggs in one basket"; Markowitz showed how many baskets and which ones.
Ideas it gave us
Diversification is spreading money across many different investments so a loss on one has less effect on the whole portfolio.
🎮 ETFs let you invest in a whole group of people at once.
Open the full entry →A portfolio is the full set of investments a person or fund owns, such as stocks, funds, bonds and cash.
🎮 Your portfolio page shows your holdings, cash, savings, options and net worth.
Open the full entry →Asset allocation is how you divide a portfolio among types of investment, such as stocks, bonds and cash, based on your goals and tolerance for risk.
🎮 Your portfolio in the game mixes shares, ETFs, options, cash in savings and farm plots. How you split them is your asset allocation.
Open the full entry →Standard deviation measures how spread out a set of numbers is around its average. In investing, it's the usual measure of volatility.
🎮 The game measures each person's volatility as the standard deviation of their returns and uses it to price their options.
Open the full entry →Risk tolerance is how much loss or price swing an investor can accept, financially and emotionally, in pursuit of higher returns.
🎮 The house bots each have a different risk tolerance, from SafeBot, which trades rarely and carefully, to YoloBot, which trades often and aggressively. Their results on the leaderboard show how each approach plays out.
Open the full entry →In 1954 Paul Samuelson defined goods whose use by one person doesn't reduce what's left for others, and showed why private markets supply too little of them.
💡 Why it made sense then
It explained why defence, lighthouses and basic research are usually paid for by taxes.
Ideas it gave us
A public good is non-excludable (you can't stop people using it) and non-rival (one person's use doesn't reduce another's), like national defence or a lighthouse. Markets underprovide them because of free riders.
🎮 This Wiki is a small public good: free for everyone, and one person reading it doesn't stop anyone else.
Open the full entry →The first federal income tax returns were due on 1 March 1914, and the deadline later moved to March 15. The Internal Revenue Code of 1954 moved it to April 15, starting in 1955.
Late payers owe a penalty, today 0.5% of the unpaid tax for each month, plus interest.
💡 Why it made sense then
Far more people filed after World War II, and the IRS needed more time to process returns.
🎮 In Journey Shares
The game's tax day is every Monday at 12 AM ET, with the same 0.5% late penalty.
Ideas it gave us
Tax day is the deadline to file your return and pay what you owe. In the US it's usually April 15, and paying late adds penalties and interest.
🎮 The game's tax year is a week. Taxes owed build up and are due on tax day, Monday 12 AM ET. Pay any time before then, or they're taken from your cash, savings or shares with a 0.5% late penalty, the real IRS monthly rate.
Open the full entry →Working at Bell Labs, John Kelly published a formula in 1956 for how much of your money to stake on a favourable bet. Betting more than that raises the risk of ruin.
💡 Why it made sense then
Knowing you have an edge isn't enough; betting too much can still wipe you out.
Ideas it gave us
Position sizing is deciding how much money to put into a single trade, usually based on how much you're willing to lose if it goes wrong.
🎮 The game doesn't stop you putting everything into one person. Your portfolio lists each position's value next to your net worth, so you can see how much rides on each.
Open the full entry →Launched on 4 March 1957, the S&P 500 weights each company by its market capitalization, so bigger companies count for more. It became the most followed measure of the US stock market.
💡 Why it made sense then
Computers made it possible to calculate a broad index quickly, and weighting by value better reflects what investors actually own.
Ideas it gave us
A market index is a number that tracks the combined price of a set group of stocks, such as the S&P 500 (500 large US companies), to show how that part of the market is doing.
🎮 Each game ETF is also an index of its group: its price tells you how that set of people is doing overall.
Open the full entry →Market capitalization is the total value of a company's shares: the share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding.
🎮 Every profile shows its market cap, and ETFs weight the people inside them by it.
Open the full entry →In 1958 Francis Bator brought together externalities, public goods and monopoly as reasons a free market may not reach the best outcome.
💡 Why it made sense then
Economists needed a clear account of when markets work well and when they don't.
Ideas it gave us
Market failure is when a free market, left alone, doesn't produce the efficient outcome. Causes include externalities, public goods, monopoly power and information asymmetry.
🎮 The game's bank shows one kind: without limits, borrowers would take on too much risk because a bailout covers the bank's losses.
Open the full entry →A Monetary History of the United States (1963) argued that a collapse in the money supply turned the downturn of 1929 into the Great Depression.
💡 Why it made sense then
It changed how central banks think about their job in a crisis.
Ideas it gave us
The money supply is the total amount of money in an economy. M1 counts cash and checking deposits; M2 adds savings and other near-money.
🎮 New play money enters the game through signup and daily bonuses, rewards and bailouts. The treasury page shows how much has been printed for bailouts.
Open the full entry →In 1964 William Sharpe (and others around the same time) showed that investors should be paid for risk they can't diversify away, measured by beta, on top of the risk-free rate.
💡 Why it made sense then
It gave investors a benchmark for whether a return was worth its risk.
Ideas it gave us
The capital asset pricing model says an investment's expected return equals the risk-free rate plus its beta times the market's extra return over that rate.
🎮 The game doesn't calculate CAPM, but the idea shows: listings that swing with the whole market should pay more to be worth holding than savings, which pay close to the risk-free rate.
Open the full entry →Beta measures how much a stock tends to move compared with the whole market: a beta of 1 moves with the market, above 1 moves more, below 1 moves less.
🎮 The game doesn't publish a beta, but you can see it at work: some listings rise and fall with the whole market, others move on their own news. ETFs tend to move like the group inside them.
Open the full entry →The risk-free rate is the return on an investment with no default risk, usually taken as the yield on short-term US Treasury bills. Every riskier investment should promise more than it.
🎮 The closest thing to a risk-free rate in the game is savings at the bank: insured up to $25,000 and paying a little under the Federal Reserve's rate.
Open the full entry →In the mid-1960s Eugene Fama argued that competition among investors makes prices reflect available information, so beating the market consistently is very hard.
💡 Why it made sense then
Studies kept finding that professional managers rarely beat the market after costs.
Ideas it gave us
The efficient market hypothesis says stock prices already reflect all available information, so no one can consistently beat the market except by luck or by taking more risk.
🎮 Game prices react only to what players know and do, and they move on news only when players act on it. Being early to news is how players try to beat the crowd.
Open the full entry →In the 1960s, raiders could quietly buy up a company's shares and launch a surprise takeover. The Williams Act of 1968 required anyone passing a set ownership threshold to file a public disclosure with their plans; the threshold was lowered to 5% in 1970.
💡 Why it made sense then
Shareholders deserved to know when someone was building a controlling stake, before they sold to them.
🎮 In Journey Shares
Whale alerts announce when a player's holding crosses 10% of a listing's pool, and every 5 points above that.
Ideas it gave us
In the US, anyone who comes to own more than 5% of a company's voting shares must disclose it publicly, with their intentions, within days.
🎮 When any player's holding crosses 10% of a listing's pool, and each 5 points above that, it's announced publicly in whale alerts.
Open the full entry →Information asymmetry is when one side of a deal knows more than the other. It can cause adverse selection, where bad products or risks drive out good ones.
🎮 The house bots use only public information: prices, moves, trade counts and vouches. They never see your trades before they happen.
Open the full entry →Akerlof's 1970 paper showed that when sellers of used cars know more than buyers, buyers pay only an average price, good cars leave the market and quality falls.
💡 Why it made sense then
It explained why warranties, inspections and disclosure rules exist.
Ideas it gave us
Information asymmetry is when one side of a deal knows more than the other. It can cause adverse selection, where bad products or risks drive out good ones.
🎮 The house bots use only public information: prices, moves, trade counts and vouches. They never see your trades before they happen.
Open the full entry →Nasdaq began on 8 February 1971 as an electronic system showing the prices at which competing dealers would buy and sell each stock.
💡 Why it made sense then
Finding the best price used to mean phoning several dealers; a screen showed them all at once.
Ideas it gave us
The bid is the highest price a buyer will pay right now, the ask is the lowest price a seller will accept, and the spread is the gap between them.
🎮 Every profile shows a broker-style quote with the bid, ask, spread and depth.
Open the full entry →A real-time quote is a stock's current price as trades happen, as opposed to a delayed quote that lags by 15 to 20 minutes.
🎮 Prices, moves and market caps in the game update live as players trade.
Open the full entry →On 15 August 1971, President Nixon stopped converting dollars into gold for foreign governments and ordered a 90-day freeze on wages and prices.
Price controls brought shortages over the next few years, and the dollar became a currency backed by trust rather than gold.
💡 Why it made sense then
The US was running low on gold and inflation was rising, and the government wanted quick action.
Ideas it gave us
A price ceiling is a legal maximum price, like rent control; a price floor is a legal minimum, like a minimum wage. A binding ceiling causes shortages and a binding floor causes surpluses.
🎮 The game has no price controls: every price floats freely on its curve.
Open the full entry →The money supply is the total amount of money in an economy. M1 counts cash and checking deposits; M2 adds savings and other near-money.
🎮 New play money enters the game through signup and daily bonuses, rewards and bailouts. The treasury page shows how much has been printed for bailouts.
Open the full entry →In 1972 the SEC adopted Rule 144, setting holding periods and volume limits on how much restricted or insider stock can be sold at a time.
By the 1990s nearly every US IPO also came with a lockup agreement with the underwriters, most often for 180 days, during which insiders don't sell at all.
💡 Why it made sense then
If insiders could sell everything at once, new public investors would be left holding the bag.
🎮 In Journey Shares
A claimed profile's escrowed shares are locked for 180 days, then can be sold only a little each day.
Ideas it gave us
A lockup period is a stretch of time after a company goes public, usually 180 days, during which insiders agree not to sell their shares.
🎮 If someone claims their profile, the 100,000 shares held in escrow for them are locked for 180 days. After that they can sell only a small amount each day, so a claim can't flood the market.
Open the full entry →The Chicago Board Options Exchange opened on 26 April 1973 with standard call options on 16 stocks. The same year, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes published their pricing formula, with Robert Merton extending it.
Traders could now calculate a fair price from volatility and turn a market price back into the volatility it implied.
💡 Why it made sense then
Standard contracts on an exchange made options easy to trade, and a formula made them possible to price.
Ideas it gave us
The Black-Scholes model is a formula for the fair price of a European option using five inputs: the stock price, strike, time to expiry, risk-free interest rate and volatility.
🎮 Journey Shares prices its options with Black-Scholes, using each person's own measured volatility.
Open the full entry →Implied volatility is the size of future price swings that an option's market price implies. High implied volatility means options are expensive because traders expect big moves.
🎮 The game prices options from each person's measured volatility, and prices rise as more players buy the same contract, much like demand raising implied volatility.
Open the full entry →An option is in the money when exercising it now would pay something: a call whose strike is below the stock price, or a put whose strike is above it. At the money means the strike equals the price.
🎮 At Friday's expiry, in-the-money options pay out automatically in play money; the rest expire worthless.
Open the full entry →An option is out of the money when exercising it now would pay nothing: a call with a strike above the stock price, or a put with a strike below it. Its whole premium is time value.
🎮 Out-of-the-money options in the game are the cheapest on the panel, and they expire worthless unless the price crosses the strike by Friday.
Open the full entry →A call option is a contract that gives its buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy a stock at a set price (the strike) before or at a set date. Buyers profit when the stock rises above the strike by more than the premium paid.
🎮 Once enough shares have traded, each profile gets calls and puts at set strikes, expiring on Fridays, settled in play money.
Open the full entry →A put option is a contract that gives its buyer the right to sell a stock at a set price (the strike) before or at a set date. Buyers profit when the stock falls below the strike by more than the premium paid.
🎮 Puts on a person pay out if their share price ends below the strike at Friday's expiry.
Open the full entry →The 1973 oil embargo and later shocks pushed US inflation above 13% by 1980 while unemployment rose. Fed chair Paul Volcker raised the federal funds rate to about 20% in 1981, causing a recession that brought inflation down.
💡 Why it made sense then
Inflation had become expected and built into wages and prices, and only very high rates broke the cycle.
Ideas it gave us
Stagflation is high inflation combined with slow growth and high unemployment. It's hard to fix because raising rates to cut inflation also slows the economy further.
🎮 The game can't have stagflation in the real sense, but inflation still eats your cash when trading is quiet, which is a small taste of it.
Open the full entry →An interest rate is the price of borrowing money, stated as a percentage of the loan per year. For savers it is the reward for lending their money to a bank.
🎮 Game savings earn a little under the Federal Reserve's published rate on reserve balances; margin loans cost more than it.
Open the full entry →On 1 May 1975, fixed commissions on US stock trades ended, 183 years after the Buttonwood Agreement. Discount brokers such as Charles Schwab soon offered cheap trades.
💡 Why it made sense then
Big institutions wanted to negotiate fees, and regulators wanted competition.
Ideas it gave us
A commission is a fee a broker charges for placing a trade. Most US brokers have charged $0 commission on stock trades since 2019.
🎮 There's no commission on game share trades, like most US brokers today. Sales pay the small SEC and FINRA fees, and options cost $0.65 a contract.
Open the full entry →A broker is a licensed firm that places trades on an exchange for you and holds your investments in an account, like Fidelity, Schwab or Robinhood.
🎮 The game works like a zero-commission broker: no fee to trade, but every sale pays the real SEC and FINRA fees.
Open the full entry →In 1976 Vanguard launched the First Index Investment Trust, which bought the S&P 500 instead of picking stocks, at a much lower fee. Critics called it "Bogle's folly".
💡 Why it made sense then
If most managers can't beat the market after fees, matching it cheaply leaves investors with more.
Ideas it gave us
An index fund is a fund that buys every stock in a market index, such as the S&P 500, in the same proportions, so it matches the market's return instead of trying to beat it.
🎮 Game ETFs work like index funds: each follows a group of people by a fixed rule and weights them by market cap, the way the S&P 500 weights companies.
Open the full entry →The expense ratio is the yearly fee a fund charges, as a percentage of the money you have in it. A 0.5% expense ratio costs $5 a year for every $1,000 invested.
🎮 A player who proposes an ETF earns its fund fee: 0.5% a year of what everyone holds in it, taken daily.
Open the full entry →Since 1977, The Stock Market Game has let school students manage a virtual portfolio, one of the best-known classroom simulators.
💡 Why it made sense then
Practising with pretend money teaches how markets work without risking savings.
Ideas it gave us
Paper trading is practising trades with pretend money, so you can learn how markets work and test strategies without risking real savings.
🎮 Journey Shares is paper trading with a twist: you trade play-money shares in people, with real-world rules for fees, taxes, margin and options.
Open the full entry →A stock market simulator is a game or tool that lets you buy and sell with virtual money under market-like rules, to learn investing without financial risk.
🎮 Journey Shares is a free stock market simulator where the "stocks" are public figures and prices move only with player trading.
Open the full entry →In 1982 US exchanges launched futures on stock indexes, first the Value Line index in Kansas City and then the S&P 500 in Chicago. Nobody could deliver a whole index, so contracts were settled in cash against an official settlement price. Index options followed in 1983.
💡 Why it made sense then
Paying the difference in money made it possible to trade on a whole market without handing over hundreds of different shares.
🎮 In Journey Shares
Game options settle in play money against a 24-hour average price, so one late trade can't decide the payout.
Ideas it gave us
A settlement price is the official price used to work out what a futures or options contract pays when it expires.
🎮 Game options settle in play money against the listing's 24-hour average price at expiry, so a single trade just before expiry can't decide the payout.
Open the full entry →In 1985 Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer showed in experiments that people stick with a choice because of what they've already spent, even when it no longer makes sense.
💡 Why it made sense then
Economics said past costs shouldn't matter; psychology showed they often do.
Ideas it gave us
A sunk cost is money or effort already spent that can't be recovered. The sunk cost fallacy is letting it drive future decisions, which should depend only on future costs and benefits.
🎮 Farm plots in the city sell back for 90% of what you paid; that 10% is a sunk cost. It shouldn't decide whether you keep the plot.
Open the full entry →The Basel Committee's 1988 accord set a common minimum: banks' capital must be at least 8% of their risk-weighted assets.
💡 Why it made sense then
Banks in different countries competed under different rules, and thin capital made failures more likely.
Ideas it gave us
Capital requirements are rules that make banks fund part of their lending with their own money (equity) so they can absorb losses without failing. Under the Basel rules the minimum is 8% of risk-weighted assets.
🎮 The game's bank must keep equity of at least 8% of its loans, under the Basel rules.
Open the full entry →Fair Isaac, founded in 1956, introduced its general-purpose FICO score in 1989. Lenders adopted it to judge borrowers quickly and consistently.
💡 Why it made sense then
Scoring replaced a loan officer's judgement with a consistent formula.
Ideas it gave us
A credit score is a number, usually from 300 to 850 in the US, that estimates how likely a person is to repay debts. Higher scores get cheaper loans.
🎮 The game has no credit scores. The bank decides what you can borrow from the value of your stocks alone, the way margin lending works.
Open the full entry →The SPDR S&P 500 ETF began trading in January 1993. It held the index but traded on an exchange all day like a stock.
💡 Why it made sense then
Investors wanted index funds they could buy and sell any time, not just once a day.
Ideas it gave us
An ETF is a fund that holds a basket of investments, such as all the stocks in an index, and trades on an exchange like a single stock. One purchase gives you a slice of everything inside it.
🎮 Game ETFs hold whole groups of people (by category, country or political view), weighted by market cap and starting at $10.
Open the full entry →In 1994 J.P. Morgan made its RiskMetrics method public, letting firms estimate how much they could lose on a bad day.
💡 Why it made sense then
Firms with huge trading books needed one number for their risk.
Ideas it gave us
Risk management in trading is limiting how much you can lose, through position sizing, stop-losses, diversification and avoiding too much leverage.
🎮 The game gives you the same tools real traders use: stop-loss price-point orders, ETFs for diversification, savings that earn interest, and limits on margin.
Open the full entry →2000–today
Trading moves online, costs fall to zero, and crises bring bailouts, quantitative easing and new rules.
Online brokers and the internet boom drew millions into trading, and many bought and sold within the same day. The Nasdaq peaked on 10 March 2000, then lost about three quarters of its value by late 2002.
In 2001 US regulators set the pattern day trader rule, requiring $25,000 in accounts that day trade often.
💡 Why it made sense then
Excitement about a real new technology ran far ahead of what the companies would earn.
Ideas it gave us
A market bubble is when prices rise far above any reasonable measure of value because buyers expect to sell to someone else at a higher price, until confidence breaks and prices crash.
🎮 Listings can bubble: a rush of buying after news pushes a price far above where it settles once the excitement fades.
Open the full entry →The market cycle is the repeating pattern of expansion, peak, contraction and recovery in prices and in the wider economy.
🎮 Listings go through their own cycles: a rush of buying when someone is in the news, a peak, a slide as holders sell, and sometimes a recovery.
Open the full entry →Day trading is buying and selling within the same day to profit from short price moves, closing every position before the market closes.
🎮 You can buy and sell as often as you like, but short-term gains are taxed at 22% versus 15% after a week, and quick round trips lose the spread and slippage.
Open the full entry →US stock prices had been quoted in fractions of a dollar, with the gap between buy and sell prices often 1/16 of a dollar. In 2001 exchanges switched to cents, and spreads narrowed.
💡 Why it made sense then
Fractions were a leftover from old trading customs, and cents made trading cheaper for investors.
Ideas it gave us
The bid is the highest price a buyer will pay right now, the ask is the lowest price a seller will accept, and the spread is the gap between them.
🎮 Every profile shows a broker-style quote with the bid, ask, spread and depth.
Open the full entry →Slippage is the difference between the price you expected and the price you actually got on a trade.
🎮 Big buys move a listing's bonding curve, so the average price you pay is above the quote you saw.
Open the full entry →In March 2001 the Bank of Japan, with interest rates already near zero and prices falling, began buying large amounts of government bonds to push money into the economy.
💡 Why it made sense then
When rates can't go lower, a central bank needs another tool.
Ideas it gave us
Quantitative easing is when a central bank creates money to buy large amounts of bonds, pushing long-term interest rates down to support the economy when short-term rates are already near zero.
🎮 The city's 🖨️ money printer event is a joke about it; the real effect in the game comes from bailouts, which create new money when the treasury runs dry.
Open the full entry →Banks had borrowed heavily against mortgage investments. When US house prices fell, losses spread, and Lehman Brothers failed on 15 September 2008.
In October, Congress approved the $700 billion TARP rescue, and in November the Fed began buying huge amounts of bonds. The rescues stopped the panic but raised worries about rewarding risk-taking.
💡 Why it made sense then
Letting big banks collapse risked freezing credit for everyone, so governments chose to rescue them.
Ideas it gave us
A bailout is when a government or central bank gives money to a failing company or bank to keep it from collapsing, usually because its failure would hurt the wider economy.
🎮 If losses wipe out the game bank's capital it fails, calls in its loans and is bailed out at the start of the next weekly season, paid first from tax revenue.
Open the full entry →Moral hazard is the tendency to take more risk when someone else bears the cost if things go wrong, such as a bank expecting a bailout or a driver who is fully insured.
🎮 The game's bank is bailed out when it fails, which shows the moral hazard: every rescue adds new money and leaves the same rules in place.
Open the full entry →Leverage is using borrowed money to increase the size of an investment, which magnifies both gains and losses.
🎮 Borrowing on margin at the bank is leverage: with half borrowed, a 10% move in your shares is about a 20% move in your own money, up or down.
Open the full entry →Quantitative easing is when a central bank creates money to buy large amounts of bonds, pushing long-term interest rates down to support the economy when short-term rates are already near zero.
🎮 The city's 🖨️ money printer event is a joke about it; the real effect in the game comes from bailouts, which create new money when the treasury runs dry.
Open the full entry →A 2006 law allowed the Fed to pay interest on banks' reserves from 2011. The financial crisis brought it forward to October 2008, as the Fed flooded banks with reserves and needed a way to keep control of short-term rates.
💡 Why it made sense then
Paying interest on reserves let the Fed set a floor under interest rates even with trillions of dollars of reserves in the system.
🎮 In Journey Shares
The game's bank earns this rate on its spare cash, updated daily, which is where savers' interest comes from.
Ideas it gave us
Interest on reserve balances is the rate the Federal Reserve pays banks on money they keep at the Fed. It sets a floor under the rates banks lend at.
🎮 The game's bank earns the Fed's published rate on reserve balances on its spare cash, updated daily. Savers get a little under it and margin borrowers pay more.
Open the full entry →The federal funds rate is the interest rate at which US banks lend reserves to each other overnight. The Federal Reserve sets a target range for it, and it drives borrowing costs across the economy.
🎮 The game's savings and margin rates follow the Fed's interest rate on reserve balances, which moves with the federal funds rate.
Open the full entry →The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 tightened oversight of banks, including the Volcker Rule, which bars banks from most trading for their own profit. Internationally, Basel III raised capital requirements.
💡 Why it made sense then
The crisis showed banks had too little capital and too much risky trading.
Ideas it gave us
The Volcker Rule bars US banks that take insured deposits from most trading for their own profit, and limits their stakes in hedge funds and private equity.
🎮 The game's bank never buys stocks with depositors' money. It keeps spare cash at the Fed, as the Volcker Rule and capital rules push real banks to do.
Open the full entry →Capital requirements are rules that make banks fund part of their lending with their own money (equity) so they can absorb losses without failing. Under the Basel rules the minimum is 8% of risk-weighted assets.
🎮 The game's bank must keep equity of at least 8% of its loans, under the Basel rules.
Open the full entry →Around 2017, developers described bonding curves, formulas that set a token's price from how many are in circulation. In November 2018 Uniswap launched an exchange that priced trades with a constant-product formula, with no order book.
💡 Why it made sense then
Without a company matching buyers and sellers, a formula could always quote a price.
Ideas it gave us
An automated market maker is a pricing formula that always quotes a price to buy or sell, instead of matching buyers with sellers in an order book.
🎮 Every listing is priced by an automated market maker: a curve fixed when the listing opens (exponential, power or constant product) always quotes a price, so you never wait for someone on the other side.
Open the full entry →A bonding curve is a formula that sets an asset's price from how many units are in circulation, so each purchase raises the price and each sale lowers it.
🎮 Every listing's public pool is priced by a bonding curve, so even a brand-new listing always has a quote.
Open the full entry →Robinhood's app offered commission-free stock trades from 2015. In October 2019 Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade and E*Trade all cut their stock commissions to zero.
💡 Why it made sense then
Competition had pushed fees down for decades, and brokers could earn from interest and order flow instead.
Ideas it gave us
A commission is a fee a broker charges for placing a trade. Most US brokers have charged $0 commission on stock trades since 2019.
🎮 There's no commission on game share trades, like most US brokers today. Sales pay the small SEC and FINRA fees, and options cost $0.65 a contract.
Open the full entry →A broker is a licensed firm that places trades on an exchange for you and holds your investments in an account, like Fidelity, Schwab or Robinhood.
🎮 The game works like a zero-commission broker: no fee to trade, but every sale pays the real SEC and FINRA fees.
Open the full entry →In March 2020, as the pandemic hit, the Federal Reserve cut rates to near zero, began buying bonds on a vast scale and set banks' reserve requirement to zero.
💡 Why it made sense then
The economy was shutting down almost overnight, and the Fed moved to keep credit flowing.
Ideas it gave us
Quantitative easing is when a central bank creates money to buy large amounts of bonds, pushing long-term interest rates down to support the economy when short-term rates are already near zero.
🎮 The city's 🖨️ money printer event is a joke about it; the real effect in the game comes from bailouts, which create new money when the treasury runs dry.
Open the full entry →Fractional reserve banking is the system in which banks keep only part of their deposits as cash reserves and lend out the rest, which creates new money in the economy.
🎮 The game's bank lends out part of what savers deposit, like a real bank, and keeps the rest at the Federal Reserve.
Open the full entry →In January 2021, traders on social media piled into GameStop, a stock many hedge funds had sold short. As the price soared, short sellers had to buy back at a loss, pushing it higher still.
💡 Why it made sense then
When more shares are sold short than can easily be bought back, a burst of buying can trap the sellers.
Ideas it gave us
A short squeeze is a sharp price rise that forces short sellers to buy shares back to limit their losses, which pushes the price even higher.
🎮 A squeeze can happen in the game: if a person many players have shorted starts rising, short sellers buying back push the curve up further.
Open the full entry →Short selling is borrowing shares, selling them, and buying them back later, to profit if the price falls.
🎮 Short any person through the bank once your account is big enough, with 150% collateral like real brokers require.
Open the full entry →Silicon Valley Bank held long-term bonds that lost value as rates rose, and most of its deposits were above the insured limit. In March 2023, depositors tried to withdraw about $42 billion in a single day, and regulators closed the bank.
💡 Why it made sense then
Phones and social media let a run spread in hours instead of days.
Ideas it gave us
A bank run happens when many depositors withdraw their money at once because they fear the bank will fail, which can make it fail even if it was sound.
🎮 The game's bank can fail if losses on its loans wipe out its capital. Savings are insured only up to $25,000, so large savers have reason to worry when losses grow.
Open the full entry →🎮 Practise with $10,000 in play money
Try it in a live 3D city with play money: trade shares in real public figures, get margin-called, pay your taxes and rob a bot or two. Free, and nothing real is at stake.
Practise with $10,000 in play money
Free. No real money involved.
For learning only. This isn't financial advice.
