Stock Market

[CSG02]

One Idea is the Stock Market.

I thing that is the Airlines administrator could invest some money into stock and Maybe come out with a little more money



Just a Idea that I have been thinking about.

Regards,


Eric Grams
CEO
Columbus Virtual Airlines

[CAPFlyer]

Please use the search function before posting on this (or any) forum. This has been brought up multiple times and the answer is, and will always remain the same-

NO.

[Konny]

Well, actually I had some ideas on how this might work. We were always of the opinion that stock market based on supply and demand cannot work in a system like this. But what if we say that the value of the shares are based on how the airline performs compared to the other airlines. We could easily calculate some kind of an average-growth value for the whole system and use that to adjust the value of the shares. This is just an idea so far but I'll do some tests to see how it works.

[CAPFlyer]

Konny, believe me, we're better of not going down that road. There have been 6 VA Stock Markets. All have tried various ways of controlling share price to keep it from becoming "stupid". All have failed. There are people out there who see a VA Stock Market, jump on it, and find a way to cheat the system to the point where one or a small few control the entire system no matter what the admins/developers/owners try to do.

[flightsimer]

i understand why your saying no Chris, but can we openly talk about it as a whole without just saying no. it takes failure to be successful, so just because it didn’t work in the past, doesn’t mean we couldn’t make it work here.

i wouldn’t mind having a stock market even if it was limited in the things we could do.

things that would have to be able to be done
*ability to sell/buy/trade stock
* able to make/loose money from it

now things i wouldn’t mind in giving up some reality to adapt it for our use (these might not all be needed or done in this way/fine tuned for actual use)

*limit the amount of stock one company can have in another based on location and just plain limit the amount. im thinking of maybe 49% for one airline owning another and 30% (which is what i think US' real amount, it might be a little off) of owning a foreign airline
*limit the number of companies an airline may have stock in. this would keep from one airline having stock in all of them and just becoming a major airline without doing anything...

these two are to prevent people from being hedge fund traders

* allow mergers, but the ultimate decision of the merger would be of the CEO(s) or staff of the airline trying to get taken over so no hostile takeovers could be done.

nobody wants to loose their airline, so they shouldn’t have to.

*also, if you don’t want your airline on the market, then you can make your airline a "private" airline in the options page.

now as i was reviewing the thoughts of this post, i got to thinking. has anyone here playing railroad tycoon? i only played it with the unlimited demo, but maybe we could take the basis of that stock market and use it for this. now i haven’t played it for probably a year or more so i don’t remember exactly what all it was based on, but it might work.

[CAPFlyer]

Tyler, if you do a search of the forum, you'll find that we've talked about this VERY openly several times in the past.

I'm sorry, but if you want to try it, fine, but leave me and John out of it. We've both been part of previous attempts and they all went nowhere. You can put in all the controls you want but there are two things that get in the way every time - HACKERS and WHINERS. The first group is the one that always finds or makes a way to cause problems, the second is the one that makes your life as an admin miserable by whining about every little thing, including the extremely obvious problems the first group is causing and that you've already agreed is a problem. I know of one former stock market programmer who just about went mad trying to "fix" the problems that were being caused by the hackers.

Remember too, these stock markets had no bearing on the VA's that were participating as they had no direct link to them, but they still caused a lot of grief because the CEO's participating wanted to be more realistic and it really pained them (and the employees that were participating as well) that things were going so horribly wrong. While mergers weren't possible and hostile takeovers really did nothing, the aggravation of having someone come in and dictate your share price was just as real.

[alemaobaiano]

You can leave me out of this idea too!

I'm not interested in comparing the performance of "my" airline to others, particularly when there are so many different ways to operate on FSAirlines. Does the value of my airline reflect the fact that we have no flights at 16x? There are airlines worth billions who fly A380s at 16x, there are airlines who operate c206s at 1x, airlines who only fly older aircraft, airlines flying 744s into 1500m airfields, and those who operate in a relatively realistic way. How would those factors affect the share price?

I can see that this would be an attractive idea for those who just want to pile up the cash, but how many of the active VAs are run like that? Those that I was involved in (CBFS, Venture Hawaii) before starting my own airline weren't run that way, and neither is "my" airline. The only people who are interested in how we perform are the pilots flying at Amazonas. Having others tell us that we are under performing, for example, would be very irritating, not to mention the impact on the already difficult task of recruiting pilots.

If the stock market has no influence on the company, what is the purpose? Where is the benefit?

[Quantum]

A thumbs down from me unless Konny wins the Lottery and can buy a nice server that won't slow to a crawl with all these requested 'features'. Even then I would have no interest in it. Let's concentrate on the flying and getting the client and the operational side of flying sorted. Wouldn't it be nice if the FSA website could limit payloads by aircraft type according to airport characteristics. I'd rather that sort of feature than a 'stock market'.

Regards

John

[Motomad1]

Heres another VA Program that is going to start a VA Sotck Market. Dont think it has opened yet but somehting to keep your eye out for if you want to have a stick market on here.

http://www.vafinancials.com/newsite/market.php

Doesnt Mind me if we have one or not.

[Miikoyan]

Personally I am against stock market here ( considering that I was once a proponent of stock market ) just because a) the amount of programming needed to have the said stock market operate, b) I rather have other features (like three class seating, sub-airlines, insurances, loans, etc) go online than a stock market, and c) it's rather complicated

In order for a realistic stock market to exist, we need several features:
Short positions
Long positions ( your normal method of buying/selling stocks, for those who don't know)
Fluctuating market
Active participation by more than 1/4 of the members at FSAirlines for a market to fluctuate

Futhermore it's very easy to exploit the system
^ Kinda hard to explain, but here's one scenario:

Let's say that an airline (Airline A) IPO's (Initial Public Offering - when a company offers its stock to the public for the first time) and puts 49% on the market. If the airline's worth 100 million dollars at offering, it will earn 49 million dollars from, let's say, Airline B. Airline A then go ahead and crash an airplane or two to bring down the value to ~50 million dollars, and airline B, fearing for further lowering of the stocks, sells these stocks, allowing Airline A to buy back at a firesale price of ~24.5 million dollars, an earning of 24.5 million dollars for Airline A.

Also, it's very easy for two airlines to come up with a get-rich-quick scheme.

Because it's very to exploit the system if you know how the system works, and the amount of resources it would take, and given the fact that it's nearly impossible to catch any of the bad guys before they harm others, I am against a stock market taking place.

[Konny]

Well, if we introduce a stock market we wouldn't force any airline to take part. Every airline can decide on it's own if and when it sells stocks.
And I wouldn't try to make a really realistic stock market, just build on the basics so it fits into our system. Nothing too complicated, a simple buying/selling of stocks without any offer/demand system (That would need more people participating). So the fluctuations are only based on the performance of the airlines. That wouldn't be so hard to implement.

Let's say that an airline (Airline A) IPO's (Initial Public Offering - when a company offers its stock to the public for the first time) and puts 49% on the market. If the airline's worth 100 million dollars at offering, it will earn 49 million dollars from, let's say, Airline B. Airline A then go ahead and crash an airplane or two to bring down the value to ~50 million dollars, and airline B, fearing for further lowering of the stocks, sells these stocks, allowing Airline A to buy back at a firesale price of ~24.5 million dollars, an earning of 24.5 million dollars for Airline A.

Well, then Airline B would loose the ~24.5mio$ that Airline A has earned and wouldn't buy any more stocks from that Airline I guess. And if we say that only well established Airlines can participate (let's say 6 month registered on FSAirlines) we make sure that no one intentionally wants to ruin his/her Airline.

But what I'm concerned about is that firstly there might not be enough activity on the market, so if you buy a stock you might hardly be able to get rid of it later. And secondly several airlines could work together to 'push' one airline by transfering the pilots and do flights only for one va. But I don't know if they would earn more money by the stocks then if they flew own their own. Have to do some calculations to see what effects that would have.