Short selling stocks in Stonks-9800 is a little unintuitive and I’ve seen fellow community members mention this point a few times here and there so I wanted to make this guide to hopefully clear up the mechanic as it currently works in the 0.1 patch(es).
Mechanics
Short selling is the act of borrowing shares and selling it at current market price with the expectation that the stock price will drop in the future and you can buy back the borrowed shares at a lower price and make a profit in the difference between the two points.
In Stonks-9800 there is a tab in the exchange menu for short selling.
For my examples, I will be using Ikuzu to demonstrate.
As can be seen in the screenshot above, we already have 50 shares in Ikuzu.
Moving onto the short selling screen, it looks very similar to the regular exchange, except instead of stocks/ownership% we have credit/owned shares.
Let’s start by shorting 100 shares of Ikuzu:
We do this simply by pressing the + button and increment it to the amount we want, similar to the exchange you can also change the rate at which you increment by changing the x1-99 setting.
You can see at the bottom of the menu, it says we’ll get ¥199,468.32 for this exchange (minus the trade percent). This will be immediately credited to your account upon pressing deal.
From now on I will be short 100 shares (denoted as credit 100 in the exchange menu) and every month I will be paying to borrow those shares (sorry if the numbers don’t match, I reloaded the save because I forgot to grab this screenshot the first time)
To close out the shorted shares you can either use your pre-existing owned shares in the company or buy them at the current market price. To do this in-game, you just press the minus button and it’ll use either of the 2 options I previously stated to close out your borrowed shares.
When using pre-existing shares to close out your shorts, the transaction at the bottom will note that ¥0 has been exchanged.
Meanwhile if you buy the shares outright, it will take that money from your current capital
The game will prioritize using pre-existing shares which can be annoying if you wanted to hold them or if the cost basis of the pre-existing shares would cause a loss.
This is why I tend to prefer shorting companies I have 0 shares in although you could buy the exact amount of shorted shares at current price on the exchange and then use those in the short selling menu to cover your borrowed shares, it’s an extra hassle.
The total amount of shares you can short at a time is based both on your current capital (I don’t know the exact % of your cash) and the amount of outstanding shares in the company (you can’t short more shares than what would get you 100% ownership in the company).
I hope this guide clears things up on how to use the short-selling feature, it’s a very powerful tool, especially on harder difficulties and/or starting with lower initial capital to get your initial stack of cash to work with.
As a bonus, a handy trick I like to do at the start of a campaign is to borrow the max amount of money from the bank loan I am allowed and then use that increase in capital to short more shares than I can with my starting cash, then use all that cash to work on my first investment and snowball from there (also trying to pay back the bank cash ASAP and the borrowed shares when reasonable).
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