Yes, I said it. Empire Avenue is rigged. I have been playing it hard all week rising up the leader board, but I have come to the conclusion that it does not work like a typical free-market exchange like many people would think. No, instead it is rigged — in your favour.
Our favourite new site is rigged in several important ways. The first has to do with the fact that you are continually selling shares for which you get some money. Let’s look at how a real market works. A company goes out and conducts an initial public offering (IPO) from which they raise major funds. Then, the public trading begins, and one investor sells to another. If you want some Apple stock, you buy it from another investor. If you buy twenty shares at $24 a piece, Apple does not get any of that.
Continual Share Offering
Compare the Apple situation to yours — some investor, ticker name LOOT, comes along and buys from you twenty shares at 24.00 eaves. You get roughly half or 12.00e (less commision) a share or 240e. Even if you run out of the 10,000 shares you have like that, you can still buy more (and should). When a company does that, they have to be careful about making themselves less valuable to their existing investors. That happens in theory here, but few people pay attention. Sure its good for a company when its stock goes up, but its much more personal and direct when your share prices goes up as it is cash in your hand.
Always Able to Sell
Not only is there pretty much no shortage of shares to buy, there is no shortage of shares you can sell. The system always buys them back. So, you don’t have to wildly raise an buying price or lower a selling price to do a trade in a stock that is not moving. This helps moderate huge swings.
Predictable Earnings & Dividends
The real stock market, doesn’t have someone magically raising your share price overnight if you have been busy and giving all your shareholders a nice dividend. This just gives someone more incentive to hold on to you if you are busy social networking through the site. It helps that the site makes it easy to see who has been busy and who has been missing-in-action further reducing the unknowns. You know for sure if someone has not been on the site that day, there stock price is going down at market close and if they have been active, it is going up.
No Interest on Bank Balances
In the real financial world, you can make money from guaranteed investments and savings accounts. You have to way this against how much money you think you can make in the stock market. On Empire Avenue, we do not get any interest on our bank balances making stock purchases even more appealing.
Investment Strategies
So what should you do as an investor? You should buy and hold those people that are active on the site. You do not have to worry too much that just because they may have had a big run up, they are going to have a big fall. You should also sell people that have not been active. They will go down overnight and people do not rush in to buy someone just because their price is low — unless they know that person has been active in the past and will be again. You should also be careful about attractive looking stocks that are not active. From what I have seen, those have not produced well.
My Approach
Me, I am not worried about trying to buy on dips. I do not care if your price is up 5eaves that day. I am looking at what I think you are going to keep doing activity wise. The riskiest thing I do is buy shares in brand new people without a track record. However, there the risk is rigged in your favour too. A recent arrival’s price might go down from lack of activity, but there cannot be a big sell-off when almost nobody owns shares.
Conclusion
So, pay more attention to long-term value building and less attention to individual price dips and rises. By keeping active on the site and using how the game is rigged in our favour, I have risen from the ranks of new users to number 15 on the share price leader board in just over a week. Come join me, the view is great.
