I think it would make much more sense to exempt registered and approved financial services companies trading through company accounts from the current rolling stock market trading limit. At the moment, individual characters are subject to an approximately $50,000 rolling 24-hour trading limit across stock purchases and sales, and I completely understand why this limit exists at the moment for players.

The system is obviously there to prevent abuse and without it, it would be prone to exploitation where you could repeatedly buy and sell shares, recycle capital through the market and generate large amounts of money in a very short period of time. While I am not suggesting that this restriction be removed for individual characters buying/selling shares on their own — I am proposing a distinction between personal stock trading (which would continue to be subject to the existing rolling limit); and corporate investment activity conducted by financial services businesses.

The current trading limit makes services like investment and portfolio management, advisory services, market research and stock analysis extremely difficult to operate. One or several clients managed by a firm with over $50K AUM cannot realistically manage that portfolio under a $50K trading-volume allowance, especially since both sides of a transaction count toward the limit. Say you're trusted to manage a $100K investment, under the current regulations, purchasing $20K worth of shares and reselling those shares for $25K would mean $45K of trading volume has already been wasted over/from one position. The business would effectively be finished trading for the day despite only having managed a relatively small amount of client capital which means it's completely unsustainable long-term.

Obviously, this should not become an easy method of bypassing the personal trading restriction so maybe a system should be made where player-run and player-driven corporate investment transactions are separately logged (including monitoring whether players are abusing by transferring large sums from their corporate account to the personal one, and punishing them accordingly).

Another possibility would also be giving investment firms a larger allowance / limit to conduct business. However, personally I think removing the trading-volume limit for approved corporate investment accounts makes the most sense because the problem would simply return as successful businesses expand their business. Investment firms naturally become more active as the amount of capital they manage increases and thus keeping a fixed ceiling places an artificial maximum on how successful the business can become. The more appropriate control in this scenario, in my opinion, is determining who is eligible for unrestricted corporate trading, rather than imposing an arbitrary volume ceiling once they are approved.

Why am I suggesting this? I think this suggestion could significantly expand the usefulness of the existing stock market system, add more depth and interactability in more ways than one. Currently, the stock market is something characters interact with individually. Allowing financial firms (or at least paving the way for them) to properly participate could create an entirely new player-driven industry. Not everyone might know how the market works, might have little interest in personally watching it or necessarily want to take risks themselves. Others may not even have the means to do so and would prefer relying on a business with expert knowledge / experience — this would provide that opportunity.

I've gone ahead and approved this.

It will be live on the next restart, GL investors!