Yet another thing

[Andreas the Wise]

My, this Guild's getting a lot of interest ...

I'm considering a stock exchange for Gralus. I know all the problems with this (wrote the book on them myself), but in our new minigame style am thinking of doing something where the stock currency is separate from the normal currency, and you can buy/sell shares from "the bank" (effectively creating currency). Businesses would be based on Gralan resource companies, and if you had a share in the company, you could help develop it (in a general RP way). Prices would be manually changed weekly on a simple formula based on how its doing in trade, any development people have done, and a random number. The overall incentive of playing would be a prize of 10 000 in normal currency for the first person to achieve 100 000 stock currency; to achieve monopoly (own every company); or just the richest after six months, if it takes that long.

Anyway, what I want the program to be able to do:
Have a "Bank" where people have currency.
An admin account which can change the amount of currency people hold.
Show a number of companies (probably 10) with records of prices over time.
Allow the admin account to manually change prices by inputting the percentage change from the current price.
Allow each bank account to buy/sell stocks at the current price*.
Allow people to buy/sell stocks off eachother at a negotiated price**.
Show on the front page the companies, current price and percentage change. Be able to click on the company and then see price over time.
Allow companies to be taken-over (so transfer all holdings of stock in one company into stocks in another, and stop displaying the over taken company on the main page).

*I'm still deciding whether there will be a limit in the number of stocks (which makes it easy for takeovers, but hard for buying 'from the bank') or whether you can continually buy (which makes buying/selling easy but takeovers hard) and it just displays your percentage share of current stocks, and you need to buy a minimum number to take control of the company.
**Ideally you should store the negotiated price but not change the 'current' price. I don't want people rigging things by selling one share at a huge price then selling the rest of their shares to the bank at the same price. I may add in a formula for the price change based on the volume traded privately. I'm also not sure if its possible to handle mutual transactions via the individual accounts, or whether the admin has to do this (to avoid the other person needing to approve it).