Selling your own shares

Every company is on the stock exchange from the day it is founded. It has 50 shares, and at first your company holds all of them. Selling some is a quick way to raise money: unlike a loan, you never pay it back.

You can sell your own shares at any time. Open My shares in the menu, select the shares with the box at the end of each row, then press one of the buttons below the list:

• Put out for sale: other players can buy them. Each share appears to buyers 30 to 300 minutes later, and you are paid when someone buys it.
• Instantly sell to bank for a reduced price: the money is in your savings at once, but the bank pays less than the share is worth (see Trading shares).

You cannot lose control of your company, so it is safe to sell all of them. The tutorial suggests keeping 2: that is the most shares of any one company that pay you dividends, your own included, so the others are worth more to you as money now.

Early in a round players have little money, so shares put out for sale can take a while to sell. A share you put out for sale can be taken back with Withdraw from market in its first 30 minutes, or once it is on sale, but not in between. You can still sell it to the bank at any time.

You do not choose a price. A share sells for your company's share price at the moment it is bought.

• For the first 7 days after founding, the share price is your Company Value divided by 50.
• After that it moves every midnight. It goes up by 1% of the day's rise in Company Value (and down with a fall), and it follows your climb or fall in the C-rank. The C-rank part is at most 25% either way in a day.
• The weekly awards on Mondays (the Success, Growth and Savings awards) each add a bonus to the winner's share price.
• It never falls below £1.

The Dividends tab on the shares pages shows your share price over the last two weeks and who holds your shares.

The money from a sale goes into your savings and counts towards your Company Value like any other money you earn (see Company Value and bankruptcy). Selling your own shares earns no S-points.

Your shareholders share in your sales. 10% of every sale your company makes goes into its stockpile, whether or not you have sold any shares, and that money is never yours to spend. Every Sunday at 06:00 each share is paid 2% of the stockpile, and the holder pays 20% tax on it. The part for shares that pay nobody, such as those the bank holds, stays in the stockpile. It carries over up to £50,000, and anything above that is lost. The Dividends tab shows your stockpile and the next payout per share.

Only 2 of your own shares can pay you, so selling the rest costs you nothing in dividends.

If your company closes, the shares other players hold in it are worthless. When the round ends, the bank buys every share that is still held.