Originally Posted by
Slave Girl
Since I've been interested in the stock market method lately, I've done some math on exactly how long it would take using the various stock market methods. Assuming that you always buy at the 1/4 point and sell at the 3/4 point, the multiplier in profit from each of the commodities is as follows:
Coffee: 1.22x
Gold: 1.48x
Diamond: 2.25x
The various methods of stock market trading (measured in 1 hour cycles) are as below:
- 2x Gold: 2.18x
- 1x Diamond: 2.25x
- 6x Coffee: 3.33x
- Diamond, Coffee, Gold, Coffee: 4.95x
The Diamond > Coffee > Gold > Coffee rotation thus yields, by far, the best rewards. Assuming some inefficiency, so we only get a 4x multiplier instead of the 4.95x, we can calculate the amount of time it takes to go up 3 digits (3 after the exponential scale):
ln(1e3) / ln(4) = 4.95 hours
In other words, it takes 5 cycles of the Diamond > Coffee > Gold > Coffee rotation in order to increase your exponent/digits by 3, or 20 individual trades. 1e300 would take 500 cycles or 2000 trades normally, which is around 500 hours or 63 days if you trade for around 8 hours a day. Each 3 digits you start the trade with decreases this by 5 hours, so if you start trading stocks at 1e18, it will save you a total of 30 hours.
It's a considerable effort to max out the game by this method, and if you do achieve it, you deserve to win the game. Of course, you can actually spam speed ups in the stock market to make this quicker (and it does save a decent amount of effort despite only lasting 10 minutes).