What this article fails to mention is the most interesting aspect of the GTAV stock market.
You can buy stock in a company and then accept missions to assassinate a competitors keep employees!
You can buy stock in a company and then accept missions to assassinate a competitors keep employees!
FTA Throughout the game, you're given opportunities to manipulate the markets. Some missions, for example, require that you kill the CEO of a company. You could, theoretically, buy the stock of that company's competitors and profit when they rise after the killing. And since there's no SEC policing stock trading in Los Santos, you're not going to be busted for insider trading.
The guy giving you the assassination missions more or less tips you off each time what stock to buy.
1. My understanding is that this has been widely theorized and fairly well researched, and most people have concluded that there's no relationship.
2. I don't understand why a rampage would cause the stock price of an insurance company to go up. You could argue that in the long-run, living in a town with regular rampages might encourage people to buy more insurance, but one would think that in the short term all of those payouts would be really bad for the insurance company.
although the game focuses on a single character and thus makes the actions of that character carry supreme importance, in the larger context the actual effect isn't that great compared to the average.
However, the media effect in the context of the game would probably be pretty fantastic, in effect creating free marketing for the company.
At least, that's how news media plays into things like that where I am living.
I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to short the stock of the drug company whose jurors I was sent to kill, but gave up and simply bought the rival's stock. (I think I made more money off that one transaction than any actual mission aside from the final one.)