Stock market

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The stock market on Prosperity is the Prosperity Index — a single, server-wide market operated by the Central Bank. Every investor holds a piece of the same index: when it rises, every position grows by the same percentage, and when it falls, every position shrinks by the same percentage. There are no individual stocks to pick; the skill is in reading the market — knowing when to be invested, when to take profit, and when a drop is an opportunity.

This page is a complete course: how the Prosperity market works, how to read charts and spot patterns like a trader, and how real-world stock markets work. Everything here can be learned by playing — no outside videos required.

The Prosperity Index

The index started at a level of 100 at launch, so the level is also its total growth since opening (a level of 110 means +10% all-time). It is the same market for everyone — there are no balance tiers, no private rates, and no way to get a different price than the player next to you.

When	What happens
Every hour	The index moves. Hourly moves are usually small, but they add up — this is the "heartbeat" you watch during the day.
4 AM (daily close)	The day's net move becomes official. Gains and losses are applied to every position, and the close is posted to the Discord `#market-news` channel.
Weekly close	The week's net move is announced in chat — the number that matters most for long-term investors.

The market runs hot and cold. Winning streaks can stack large weekly gains, and corrections can wipe gains back out just as fast. Over the long run the index is built to grow with the server's economy — but "long run" is doing real work in that sentence. Any single day or week can go badly.

How your money tracks the index

Your position is updated at each daily close, not hour by hour. The hourly moves show where the day is heading; 4 AM is when the result lands on your balance. Three rules follow from this, and they reward honest investing over clever timing:

New money starts earning at the next daily close. A day's gain is paid on the smallest amount you held for that whole day — so jumping in at 11 PM to grab a green day earns nothing extra.
Losses apply to whatever is invested at the close. If a day is going badly, selling before 4 AM genuinely limits the damage — the close only hits what's still in.
Selling mid-day pays your value as of the last close. The day-so-far number in /stocks is a preview, not yet your money.

Costs and taxes

Minimum investment: $50. No maximum, and no fees to buy or sell.
Capital gains tax: 15% of realized gains, withheld automatically when you sell. The bank tracks what you paid in (your cost basis); if you sell for no gain, there is no tax. Your principal is never taxed.
Stocks are exempt from the wealth tax — invested money is taxed on its gains when you sell, not for being held.

Investing

Command	Description
`/stocks`	Your position, the index level, a 24-hour mini-chart, the last seven daily closes, and any current streak
`/stocks invest <amount>`	Buy into the index
`/stocks sell <amount\|all>`	Sell back to your wallet (15% tax on the gain portion only)
`/savings`	The Central Bank menu — savings, bonds, and stocks in one place (works on Bedrock)

Tools for market watchers

In game: /stocks is the quick check — level, 24-hour sparkline, recent closes, and streak warnings.
The website: economy.prosperitysmp.com/stocks.html is the full trading desk — candlestick and line charts, 1H/4H/1D/7D views, and live cards for momentum, volatility, trend age, and a plain-English signal. Everything in the "Reading the market" section below can be practiced there.
Discord: #market-news posts every daily close, plus notes when the market is on a notable run.
Sector Watch is not the stock market. The sector indexes (/sectors, sectors.html) track real job activity in Mining, Farming, Lumber, Combat, and Fishing. They are observe-only for now and have no connection to the Prosperity Index.

Reading the market

You can do well here with no math beyond percentages. These are the concepts traders actually use, in the order you should learn them.

Reading a candlestick chart

The website's candle view packs four facts into each bar. For a 4H candle, that bar summarizes four hours of moves:

The body (the thick part) runs from where the price opened to where it closed for that period.
Green body: it closed higher than it opened. Red: it closed lower.
The wicks (thin lines above and below) show the highest and lowest points touched during the period.

What to look for: a long body means conviction (the market moved hard one way and stayed there). Long wicks with a small body mean a fight — the price swung but ended near where it started, which often shows up near turning points. A series of green bodies stacking upward is a trend you can see at a glance.

Trend

The trend is the market's overall direction over days, not hours. The simplest test: look at the 7D chart and ask whether the recent closes are mostly higher or mostly lower than a week ago. Trading with the trend (buying in an uptrend, being cautious in a downtrend) is the single highest-value habit in investing. Single hours are mostly noise — an uptrend has plenty of red hours inside it, and reacting to every one of them is how players churn money away.

Momentum

Momentum is the trend's speed — not just "is it going up," but "is it going up faster or slower than before?" A run that gained 2% a day and is now gaining 0.5% a day is still rising, but losing momentum, and fading momentum is often the earliest warning that a run is getting old. The website's momentum card computes this for you; you can also eyeball it from candle bodies getting shorter.

Volatility

Volatility is how wide the swings are, regardless of direction. A calm market drifts in small steps; a volatile one lurches. Volatility matters for sizing: in a calm market a large position is comfortable, while in a wild one the same position will hand you stomach-dropping red days — and frightened investors make bad decisions. When the volatility card runs hot, smaller positions keep you rational.

Streaks, tops, and dips

The patterns that repeat on Prosperity, written plainly:

Runs are real, and runs end. Several green closes in a row usually means more strength behind it — riding a run has been profitable. But the longer a run goes, the closer the top. Nobody rings a bell at the top; the players who keep their fortunes take profit on the way up, a piece at a time.
Big drops are often followed by strong recoveries — here, more often than not. Buying after a violent red day has minted fortunes. It has also occasionally bought into a second red day, which is why dip-buying is done in stages, never all at once.
Downturns can run for a few days. One red close is noise. Three is a downtrend — respect it, and let it show signs of stabilizing before you wade in.

The bond benchmark

The most useful question in the whole game: "Do I believe the market will beat 1.5% this week?" That's what a 7-day bond pays, guaranteed and locked at purchase. If the market is trending up with momentum, the answer is often yes — stay invested. If the market looks tired or is mid-downtrend and you can't honestly answer yes, the bond is the better trade that week. Professionals call this opportunity cost; you can just call it the bond test. Asking it once a day, after the 4 AM close, is a complete investing routine.

Strategies that work

Strategy	How it works	The catch
Buy and hold	Invest and ignore the daily noise. The index is built to grow with the economy long-run, so patience alone has positive odds.	You will sit through crashes without flinching. Most players can't.
Ride the run, skim the top	Stay invested while the trend and momentum are up; each time the run stretches on, sell a slice (say 20–25%) and bank it.	Skimming means giving up some upside if the run keeps going. That's the price of never being the player who round-tripped a fortune back to zero.
Buy the dip — in stages	After a violent drop, buy a first slice. If it falls again, buy another. Never spend your whole reserve on the first red day.	Sometimes the knife keeps falling. Stages limit the damage; all-in doesn't.
Steady drip (dollar-cost averaging)	Invest a fixed amount on a schedule — say $500 every Sunday — regardless of the price. You automatically buy more units when it's cheap and fewer when it's expensive.	Boring. Also the strategy with the best track record for people who don't want to watch charts, which is most people.

Whatever the strategy, keep your living money out of the market. Rent for your plot, shop restocking cash, and tax money stay in your wallet or flexible savings. The market is for money you can leave alone.

Mistakes that lose money

Every one of these has already cost a Prosperity player real money. They are all psychology, not math:

Buying the top (FOMO). The market's been green for a week, chat is celebrating, so you finally go all-in — at the very point the bond test says the run is old. If the excitement is what convinced you, you're late.
Panic-selling the bottom. The worst trade on the server is buying a happy top and selling a terrified bottom — it converts a temporary loss into a permanent one. If you wouldn't sell calmly, don't sell scared.
Going all-in. With everything invested you can't buy dips, can't pay rent without selling at a bad time, and can't think straight on red days. An uninvested reserve is a weapon, not laziness.
Revenge investing. Doubling down to "win back" yesterday's loss is how a bad day becomes a bad month. The market doesn't know what you lost and doesn't owe it back.
The gambler's fallacy. "Four red days — tomorrow has to be green." No it doesn't. Streaks shift the odds here, but nothing is ever due. Decide on the trend in front of you, not on what feels fair.
Confusing the market with the casino. The casino is entertainment priced with a house edge — play long enough and you lose, by design. The market has long-run growth behind it but real short-run pain. Treating the market like a slot machine (all-in, instant gratification, revenge bets) imports the casino's results into the one place built to actually pay you.

How real stock markets work

The Prosperity market is modeled on the real thing, so what you learn here transfers. Here is the real version, plainly.

What a stock actually is

A stock (or share) is a small slice of ownership in a company. Own a share of a company with 1 million shares and you own one-millionth of it — its factories, its brand, and a claim on its future profits. Companies sell shares to raise money to grow; investors buy them hoping the company becomes more valuable, and some companies also pay out a slice of profit to shareholders directly each quarter (a dividend). That's the foundational difference from Prosperity: a real share is a claim on a real business's earnings, not just a number that moves.

How prices are set

There is no official in charge of a stock's price. Real markets are a continuous auction: buyers post what they're willing to pay (bids), sellers post what they'll accept (asks), and the exchange matches them millions of times a day. The price is simply the last match — which means a price is just what the next person will pay. That's why news moves prices instantly: a great earnings report makes buyers raise their bids before a single product ships. Prices move on expectations of the future, not on the present — by the time everyone knows something is good, it's already in the price.

Market indexes

Nobody can follow thousands of stocks, so the world watches indexes — single numbers that average a basket of them. The famous ones are the S&P 500 (500 of the largest US companies — when news says "the market was up today," it usually means this), the Dow Jones (30 giants, the oldest measure), and the Nasdaq (technology-heavy). The Prosperity Index works the same way: one number standing in for the health of the whole economy. In real life you can invest directly in an index through an index fund — which is essentially what every Prosperity investor is doing.

Bulls, bears, and crashes

A bull market is a sustained rise (the nickname: a bull attacks upward with its horns). A bear market is a fall of 20% or more from the peak (a bear swipes downward). A correction is a smaller drop, around 10% — uncomfortable, routine.
Real history is dramatic. The crash of 1929 wiped out roughly 89% of the US market's value and fed the Great Depression. The dot-com bust (2000) erased fortunes built on internet hype. The 2008 financial crisis halved the market in months. The 2020 pandemic crash dropped it ~34% in five weeks — followed by one of the fastest recoveries ever.
The pattern across a century: crashes are normal, recoveries have followed every one of them so far — for the index. Individual companies are different: many businesses in those crashes went to zero and never came back. That asymmetry is the core argument for indexes over stock-picking, and it's why diversification matters.

Why markets grow over the long run

Markets aren't magic money printers — they grow because the underlying economies grow. Companies earn profits, reinvest them, invent things, and become genuinely more valuable; prices follow, unevenly and with terrifying interruptions. The US market has averaged roughly 10% per year over the last century — an average that includes 1929, 2008, and every crash between.

The engine that turns that into wealth is compounding: gains earning gains. A handy shortcut is the rule of 72 — divide 72 by the yearly return to get the years to double your money (at 10%, about 7 years; double again and again and modest savings become fortunes). On Prosperity the same arithmetic runs faster, since one real month is roughly one in-game year — which is why steady investing here visibly snowballs within weeks.

How ordinary people invest well

Decades of evidence point to a humbling conclusion: boring beats clever. The approach that consistently works for regular people, almost word-for-word what works on Prosperity:

Buy index funds, not lottery tickets. Most professional stock-pickers fail to beat the index over time. Owning the whole market is the percentage play.
Invest on a schedule (dollar-cost averaging) instead of trying to guess the perfect day.
Stay in. "Time in the market beats timing the market" — the market's best days cluster right next to its worst ones, and people who flee crashes miss the rebounds.
Diversify. Never bet everything on one company, one idea, or one asset.
Only invest money you won't need soon — the only people forced to sell at the bottom are the ones who needed the money.

And the rule that protects you from every scam ever invented: nobody can guarantee market returns. Anyone promising "guaranteed 20%" or pressuring you to act before you can think is stealing from you. Real risk-free rates are low (that's the bank); everything paying more carries risk — on Prosperity and everywhere else, forever.

Prosperity vs. the real thing

	Prosperity Index	Real markets
What you own	A position in one server-wide index	Shares of specific companies, or index funds
What drives it	The server's economy over the long run, with hot and cold streaks	Company earnings, economic growth, news, and crowd psychology
Price discovery	One shared move per hour, identical for everyone	Continuous auction between millions of buyers and sellers
Hours	24/7, daily close at 4 AM	Trading hours (US: 9:30 AM–4 PM Eastern, weekdays)
Timescale	Compressed — one real month ≈ one in-game year, so "annual" returns arrive in weeks	A doubling can take a decade
Income while holding	None from stocks (bonds and savings pay the steady interest)	Some stocks pay dividends
Taxes	15% on realized gains, withheld automatically	Capital gains taxes, rates vary by country and holding period
Guarantees	None — it can and does crash	None whatsoever. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

Glossary

Term	Meaning
Bull / bear market	Sustained rising market / falling market (bear: down 20%+ from the peak)
Rally	A strong rise after a flat or falling stretch
Correction	A moderate pullback (~10%) inside a larger uptrend
Crash	A violent, fast drop
Dip	A short-lived drop — "buying the dip" means treating it as a discount
Drawdown	How far you are below your peak value
Trend	The market's overall direction over days or weeks
Momentum	The speed of the trend — fading momentum often precedes a turn
Volatility	The size of the swings, regardless of direction
Mean reversion	The tendency of extreme moves to be pulled back toward normal
Position	The money you currently have invested
Cost basis	What you paid in — gains are measured against it
Realized / unrealized gain	Profit you've locked by selling / profit still on paper
Capital gains tax	Tax charged on realized gains only (15% here)
Taking profit	Selling part of a winning position to bank the gain
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA)	Investing fixed amounts on a schedule, ignoring price
Diversification	Spreading money across assets so one failure can't ruin you
Compounding	Gains earning gains — the engine of long-term wealth
Index	One number averaging many assets to represent a whole market
FOMO	Fear of missing out — the emotion that buys tops