Investment is a method of generating funds in Universal Paperclips during Stage 1.
Summary[ | ]
Investment is opened to the player by researching the Algorithmic Trading project. This will create a trading window where the player can Deposit funds and Withdraw them.
There are two clickable buttons and a drop down menu, as well as a list of three values. The values are for "Cash", "Stocks" and "Total", and are in dollar amounts. The drop down menu lets you choose Low, Medium or High risk investments. The clickables are "Deposit" which will deposit all of your available Funds into the market at once, and "Withdraw" which will withdraw the value currently in "Cash", leaving the value in "Stocks" behind.
You have no control over the table of stocks -- it's just a visual. Under the Investments box is a clickable for "Upgrade Investments Engine" followed by Level: n, where n is the current level. You begin at 0, and require 100 yomi to improve (see below).
At level 0, the gain/loss rate is 0.5 so the returns might be thought to be zero. However if a stock reaches 0, the stock price bounces back to 1 within a few seconds. This can not be influenced by the user, but on the low risk setting is equivalent to a return of 0.1% every 2.5 seconds, or 400% per hour.This can be expected to increase the funds by a factor of 1,000 within 5 hours.
Strategy[ | ]
- Start early, and let compound interest work its magic
- Keep at low risk at least until you've improved the investment engine to Level 2
- Withdraw half of funds before increasing the risk level. If selection was too risky and you lose funds, lower risk and deposit again.
Upgrades[ | ]
The investment engine can be upgraded with yomi (gained through Strategic Modeling)
The cost of Level is . (Here is the mathematical constant Euler's number, 2.718...).
The starting profit/loss ratio is 0.5 and increases in increments of 0.01 for each level (, n is the level)
Keep in mind that Level 3 is enough to complete Stage 1, and that Investments are only available on that stage, while Yomi will be useful on Stage 2 and vital to Stage 3. Even more, you'll probably have to make most of these improvements before AutoTourney, so it's a bit of a hassle to get so much Yomi.
You can increase the profit/loss ratio by 0.01 four times with Male Pattern Baldness, Cure for Cancer, World Peace, and Global Warming. (this is implied when the AI says, "global stock prices trending upward")
Built in System[ | ]
Based on a read through of the code for the investment machine in main.js
riskiness is assigned a value based on the chosen level: 7 Low Risk, 5 Med Risk, 1 High Risk
stockShop function[ | ]
When "shopping" for a new stock, the engine will take all cash available to the engine (cash + stocks) and allocate both a budget of total divided by riskiness (1/7 (low risk), 1/5 (med risk), or all (high risk)) and a reserve of total divided by eleven minus riskiness, except for high which is set to zero (1/4 (low risk), 1/6 (med risk), or 0 (high risk)). If your cash satisfies the budget and cash - budget is less than the reserve amount, there is a 25% chance it will buy a new stock.
createStock function[ | ]
The engine rolls a die on a table of stock prices, then buys the chosen stock with the budget, up to a hardcoded maximum of 1,000,000 shares.
| Probably | Stock Share Price |
|---|---|
| 20% | $0 to $15 |
| 40% | $0 to $50 |
| 25% | $0 to $150 |
| 14% | $0 to $500 |
| 1% | $0 to $3000 |
updateStocks function[ | ]
Every 2.5 seconds, for every stock owned it does one of two things:
- 40% of the time: the stock is unaffected.
- 60% of the time: using your "expected profit/loss ratio" it determines if your stock will go up, otherwise it will go down. The amount of change is a random value between 0 and the price of the stock, divided by 4x your riskiness.
So at the start, each stock you have you has a 40% chance of no change, 30% of going up, and 30% of going down.
sellStock call[ | ]
After 12.5 seconds, it has a 30% of selling the oldest stock, the one at the top of the list. If it doesn't sell the stock it waits 2.5 seconds and has another 30% chance of selling the oldest stock. This repeats until a stock is sold. Once that happens starts the original 12.5 second delay again.