Chapter 764.2: Wild Joy

While the Dawn City Stock Exchange was bustling with excitement, the official website in the other world was equally lively.

On the same day Baiyue Strait Development Company went public, the Silver Exchange opened a new subpage, the Equity Asset Trading Page and added the newly listed Baiyue Strait Development Company to it.

Before this, although in-game assets and equity interests could already be traded on the Silver Exchange, those assets had never been classified in detail. The launch of the new subpage undoubtedly signaled that the game’s official administrators intended to reorganize the virtual-asset trading market.

Baiyue Strait Development Company shares that had received listing numbers could only be traded using the Silver officially designated by the game. They could not be purchased directly using real-world currency or any other form of currency. Furthermore, all orders had to be publicly disclosed, and transactions could only take the form of transfers.

In other words, Baiyue Strait Development Company could not raise funds through the Silver Exchange. Players could only cash out by transferring their holdings to other players through private trading activity. After all, the Silver Exchange contained an enormous quantity of Silver that was, in essence, “game currency” distributed to the players by Chu Guang. Their nominal value contained a certain amount of inflation.

If the Baiyue Strait Development Company were allowed to raise funds there, it would be equivalent to scooping back up the bubble that Chu Guang had gone to such trouble to squeeze into the reservoir.

However, if players were forbidden from trading their equity, then listing the company would lose its meaning.

Thus, Chu Guang devised a compromise. Equity held by NPCs would circulate on the Dawn City Stock Exchange, while equity held by players would circulate on the Silver Exchange. The two systems would not interfere with one another.

Any collective fundraising conducted by the Baiyue Strait Development Company could only take place through the Dawn City Stock Exchange.

The arrangement ensured that the money flowing into production and business operations on a large scale was not inflated currency that had already been squeezed out of the system, but profits genuinely generated through the New Alliance’s social production and commercial activity.

Chu Guang would consider gradually relaxing the restriction in the future. However, for the New Alliance where a player could earn an ordinary person’s daily income by killing a single monster, it was still far too early.

If he enabled it immediately, it would be equivalent to allowing players to exploit their privileges to plunder the wealth of New Alliance citizens.

No matter how one looked at it, Chu Guang had already showered the players with more than enough money and special treatment. Now that their wings were fully grown, they ought to expand outward and open up the broader wasteland rather than harvesting the wealth of their own people.

Events soon proved that Chu Guang’s foresight was not without justification. Shortly after the Silver Exchange’s new subpage went online, the Baiyue Strait Development Company’s share price soared to 200 Silver per share!

During the same period, the average transaction price on the Dawn City Stock Exchange had risen to only 37 Silver.

The Silver Exchange did not technically have an offering price, since shares there were only traded rather than issued. Nevertheless, such an absurd discrepancy left both buyers and sellers speechless.

The scene was exceptionally strange. The order book was filled with enormous numbers of buy and sell orders, yet no transactions occurred. Even without any circuit-breaker mechanism, the trading volume remained at zero for several minutes. It looked remarkably similar to the early days of the Silver Exchange, before the auction function had even been launched.

Tail: GIAO! Two hundred Silver... Sisi! Hurry and calculate how much money we have now! Σ(°Д°;)

Sisi: Tail, people will hate us if we say it aloud. Still, rising this high is rather ridiculous... I wonder who exactly is buying.

Quit Smoking: I’m actually more curious about who’s selling. Wouldn’t it be better to just hold onto the damn shares? (－‸ლ)

Tail: Hehe, Tail secretly sold a little when it was around 50 Silver. (～︶～)

Professor Yang: Good grief, fifty?! Didn’t you lose out massively?!

No_one_understands_love: She definitely sold too cheaply. In another two months, the shares listed on the Dawn City Stock Exchange might all rise to 50 Silver.

Tail: Everyone should make money together! Besides, Tail still has several zeroes left. (＊/ω＊)

Worker Warrior: Damn it, we called her out too hastily. T.T

Escaping Mole: Damn that dog Ample Time! If the price keeps rising like this, that bastard’s net worth will be enough to buy the entire Earth!

Ample Time: Tsk. I thought you weren’t a complete newbie. Why are you starting to say such brainless nonsense too? Can a valuation be spent like money? (¬_¬)

Escaping Mole: I don’t care! O mighty developer, if you don’t nerf him, this game will become unplayable!! T.T

Night Ten: Good grief, this damn bastard is crying wolf. I almost forgot that you invested too. Nerf this asshole first!

Irene: I advise you all to stop shouting. If you keep going, Brother Light might genuinely bring down the knife. UWU

Elf Wang: Brother Light: You people have really made me suffer. (Funny)

Professor Yang: Honestly, even I’m anxious on your behalf. One share costs 37 Silver in the game, but 200 Silver on the official website. With such an enormous arbitrage opportunity, wouldn’t moving the NPC shares onto the website and selling them be free money?

Night Ten: Do you really think Brother Light failed to consider a problem even you could think of? (◔_◔)

Escaping Mole: Wash up and go to sleep. The developers already closed that bug. NPCs and players can’t transfer equity to one another at all. The ownership ratio can only change through financing.

Professor Yang: Holy shit! Doesn’t that mean all the shares you hold are non-tradable?!

Ample Time: To be precise, they’re subject to a lock-up period. Equity can be sold to NPCs through a public offering, while using the company’s working capital to repurchase and cancel tradable shares is effectively the same as buying shares back from NPCs. The only difference is that all these operations have to be carried out collectively.

- Also, the next issuance is planned to be another 8% stake, tentatively scheduled for after the next quarterly financial report or dividend plan is released. I estimate that once public ownership reaches a certain proportion, players will be permitted to participate in trading on the Dawn City Stock Exchange. After all, allowing players to trade freely at this stage really would be unfair to NPCs. Players are generally far too wealthy.

Professor Yang: Do you have so much money that you’ve run out of places to spend it? Now you’re worrying about the wealth gap among NPCs too? ୧(๑•̀ᗝ•́)૭

Ample Time: It’s just world building. Watching the New Alliance grow stronger gives us quite a sense of accomplishment too. ◡̈

Professor Yang: Fair...

Riding Donkey: Actually, this system has a very obvious loophole. Under these rules, the proportion of shares held by players will keep getting diluted. After all, repurchasing and canceling shares must be much harder than raising capital. The overall trend will inevitably be for equity to flow from the players into the hands of NPCs.

Night Ten: How do you know that’s a loophole rather than something the developers deliberately designed?

Professor Yang: Aren’t you worried at all? ୧(๑•̀ᗝ•́)૭

Ample Time: Learn to be content. If you played more games, you’d know that Brother Light’s methods for maintaining the stability of the in-game economy are already remarkably gentle. Another operator wouldn’t bother reasoning with you through all these twists and turns. They’d simply change your earnings multiplier.

Mosquito: War Thunder, which reduced the earnings of ordinary accounts to negative numbers like this post. ( ˶°ㅁ°) !!

Riding Donkey: Fuck...

...

The listing of the company was only a minor interlude for the residents of Dawn City. Had it not been for that headline in the Goblin Observation, most people might never have bothered joining the line. Well, not until several days later, when their shares rose to 40 Silver apiece.

In the lobby of the Highway Town Hotel, Zhou Nan looked at the newspaper in his hands, shook his head, and sighed with dissatisfaction. “What a shame. Each person was limited to 100,000 shares. I really wish the limit had been a million! You know, the thing I regret most in my entire life was choosing to become a merchant instead of opening that steelworks factory with you.”

In only a few days, the market value of his shares had quadrupled! They were worth 4,000,000 Silver!

Market value was not the same as cash, but he was confident that if he listed those shares on the exchange, they would be sold within a day. After all, there were plenty of wealthy people in Dawn City.

The man sitting opposite him was one such example.

Zhou Nan would bet that if he were willing to sell, this fellow would purchase them without the slightest hesitation!

Looking at his drinking companion sighing endlessly, Sun Shiqi chuckled, “It isn’t too late to regret it. Perhaps my factory will be listed in a few months too.”

“Did you hear something?” Zhou Nan’s heart stirred, and he looked at him eagerly.

After taking a sip of beer, Sun Shiqi glanced around. Seeing that no one was paying attention to them, he lowered his voice. “You don’t need to hear any rumors to work that out. If Baiyue Company were the only company approved for listing, why would the New Alliance go through the trouble of establishing a stock exchange in Dawn City? I estimate that Baiyue Company won’t be the only one. Companies collectively controlled by the shelters, such as the Bull and Horse Group and Factory 81, will probably also offer a portion of their equity to the New Alliance’s general public.”

It might not even be limited to those giants that had already begun snowballing in size. Start-ups suffering from a shortage of capital could also receive support.

The best way to accomplish that would be to first allow investors in the established companies to earn money, then entice them with the prospect of greater profits to search for gold among a large number of smaller enterprises.

If they wanted the New Alliance’s residents to invest in the Baiyue Strait Development Company, those residents first needed to possess money. If they wanted them to invest in small and medium-sized enterprises with both higher risks and greater growth potential, then they first had to allow them to profit from stable investment projects.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.