How to make lots of money in GTA 5 without Lester Assassinations?

[teetar]

I know, I was a fool, but I only invested money as Franklin during the Lester assassination missions. I thought it wuld be fine since I would be spending everything on him anyways, but it evaded my notice that I had to be Michael to buy the three Movie theatres in the town. Now I have $35m and I need $25m more on Michael so I can buy the three theatres (their total is $60m), any ideas? I've just started trying to play the stock market, although I have bad luck and no strategical idea on how exactly a stock market works (irl or in GTA). Any help that anyone can offer me will be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[Mokrie Dela]

Certain stocks do give you profit

 

Hawk and little fluctuates massively

Invest low well high

Only I've noticed it takes 1 or 2 REAL LIFE days but I've made a a sh*t load with m and f doing this

 

Beanmachine and dollarpills acted te same

 

Quicksave multiple files regularly

[killahmatic]

In the time it would take to make any kind of money, you could beat GTA 100% multiple times, at least, as far as LCN is concerned. I learned the hard way. I thought the assassination missions were only for BAWSAQ, which I dont have, so I didnt do them. Long story short, my characters were running out of money fast, so I had to get 100% all over again. It was a pain in the ass but my characters are set for life now.

Edited February 1, 2014 by killahmatic

[OrionSR]

Update: The starting LCN stock prices vary widely from game to game, so don't expect to see the same values on your current save. If you are lucky enough to have an LCN stock with a current value under 5 then it doesn't take very long to set up from the exploit. Most of the stocks (2 out of 3) that I have studied closely have bottom out near 3.4 (3.41, 3.43), have random changes as high as 0.11 and can be forced to change by a bit more than a dollar an hour, but the return rate is still about the same; a little better than 30% in one hour, and another hour to set up to do the exploit again.

 

Okay. It took a couple of days to work out a good strategy but I think I have something that can earn about 30% return on investment in about 2 hours and is repeatable. The main problem is it takes about 13 hours to set up the first time. Perhaps you can help me refine the method; this was only my first test of this strategy.

 

Observation: I can change the value of an LCN stock by about 50 cents per hour by watching the value of a specific stock as it updates every 45 seconds and quick saving when it moves in the direction I want, and loading when it doesn't.

 

Strategy: If a stock was valued at only $1.62 then an increase of 50 cents would represent a 30% ROI in two hours; one hour to grind the value up, and another hour to grind it back down to repeat the process. (1.62 is the lowest value I could achieve with Richards Majestic. I'm not sure if this is a hard limit or if other stocks have a different lowest value.)

 

Richards Majestic (RIM) is the cheapest stock on the LCN and usually hangs around $18.00 for most of the game, until sometime after Lamar Down and before The Third Way when it drops to about $8.00. This is when I decided to develop this strategy. I've got all the money from the Big Score to invest, plus a bit more from some failed experiments that were less profitable than pulling hidden packages out of the ocean at $1.2 million per hour.

 

Start with Trevor in a safe location; later you'll be trying to quickly change to the other characters and save before the stock prices update again and you don't want to run into any complications with Trevor's switch event. Save and load. Sort the LCN by stock price to bring RIM to the top of the list. Buy 1 stock of RIM so it's easy to track the price in the portfolio. Toggle between the portfolio and stock page until the price of RIM changes. If the price goes up more than 2 cents, or goes up twice, or any another other strategy that you may find more effective, then load. Save every time the price goes down. Repeat until the price of RIM won't drop any lower. For me this was at 1.62, but this trick will work even better if the price can be lower.

 

It can be a bit tricky to buy $40 million worth of stocks within the 45 second window between updates, but hopefully the first change will be 0, which seems to allow plenty of time to buy and save at the same value. Load before switching to the next character so you get the full 45 seconds to make the switch and save. Load again after buying, and do it all again for the next character.

 

There doesn't seem to be any rebound effect from sleeping or waiting. My initial impression is that there aren't any forces acting on the stock price beyond the random price change. The value will naturally trend upwards a bit since it can't randomly go lower, but then seems to fluctuate like any other stock. So, repeat the process in reverse to drive up the stock price.

 

I'm recommending selling at 30% ($2.12, 50 cent increase) but the profit could be driven much higher. I haven't done the math (I'm not sure how) to determine the most effective strategy. My thought is that in the long run, repeating 30% will be better than repeating 50% because it takes a long time to grind the stock price up and down again - the first nickel represents a much larger percentage increase than the last nickel.

Edited February 11, 2014 by OrionSR

[razorsharkhead]

you can't. they put in the stock market and lester's missions so that they would not need to add any extra content for players to do for money.

cuz they are lazy.

[fnxrak]

Ok this one probably is out off question, since if you have done the assassination missions you most probably have finished the story missions as well, but anyway I think it's worth mention this here too.

There a couple of missions that can boost your stocks besides Lester's, there are probably more but this ones I could find by googleing it (so for all that matters I'm not the one who found them) but I can assure that they work both.

1. Finish the mission "Legal Trouble" because of the mess you make in the airport the FlyUS stocks will go down afterwards, but there is a glitch the real way to get this to work is after the mission saving the game and reloading it. You can actually check this glitch easily, just check the stocks after the mission then quicksave the game and afterwards reload that save and check the stocks again they will decrease significantly.

Then all you have to do is finishing the mission "Meltdown", don't worry if you have more missions to do in-between as it will only rebound after this mission, and it can go to almost a 100% interest (I got a 99,94%), this happens right after finishing the mission so you don't really have to wait days to pass.

2. Before completing the "The Third Way" mission invest on Augury Insurance, then after the misison sell, as this stocks can have a 100% interest too.

This has something to do with the fact that Devin Weston's death means that no more vehicles will be stolen and that the insures won't be collected, thus more proffit for the insurance company.

[OrionSR]

Well... crap. After running some more experiments on some LCN stocks on my current game I loaded up a save from my first time playing and found completely different prices, so this exploit isn't going to work the same way for everyone. I suspect I had a really bad save to experiment with; the cheapest prices were much higher on my second game, so it took forever to get set up. But on this first game I have one stock starting at 3.59, and two in the 7 dollar range.

 

2nd Game: RIM bottomed out at 1.62 but had a low random variation, +/- 0.06. WorldwideFM (WFM) bottomed out at 3.41, but a had variation of 0.11 so the movement was just as lively, maybe even a bit more so.

 

1st Game: Hijak (HJK) seems to be stuck at 3.43 and seems to have the same 0.11 variation, but when I loaded this 10% Franklin and Lamar save it was currently at 3.59, so it only took a few minutes to get set up for the exploit.

 

I suspect that RIM might have been different when I was experimenting on it because I think it was tweaked by a late-game mission. But if someone can find a combination of a lower minimum with a higher variation this trick will be even more effective.

 

Starting with an initial investment of around 45 million for each character (a bit more for Michael) I've pumped this exploit for a bit more than 30% five times now, and the profit alone should be a bit more than that whenever I decide to cash in again. This should leave everyone a bit shy of 200 million to work with going into the expected 5000% return from the Lester assassinations. And Tinkle is still in the wings as well.

 

Next Game: I'll be sure to check the stocks at Franklin's first opportunity and make sure I've got a handful of really cheap stocks to work with before moving on.

Edited February 8, 2014 by OrionSR

[fnxrak]

Yeah stocks can be a bit annoying and also can sometimes change even in small periods of times even those related to missions.

Here I have gather quite a few links to some stocks exploits:

How to get max cash ($2.1B) across ALL characters

Guide to getting the highest possible take for each heist

Earn the most money in GTA: V - $1.5 billion and more!

Sorry can't ind the original on the FlyUS stock

[OrionSR]

It looks like this might be the original documentation for the FlyUS stock exploit. I've been using much of the same information, and various iterations on other sites, but none of them is terribly complete. The FlyUS exploit looks like an old one but wasn't mentioned in any of the top guides. I'll need to compile a complete list before starting over again.

 

For the record: Most of the information provided by the LCN stock market page is completely useless. The high and low are randomly assigned at the beginning of the game. The current price will(has) likely never reach(ed) those levels. The "last" value and 5-day graph are generated anew when a save is loaded and appears to always include the highest and lowest value no matter what the stock has actually been doing. Since the price movement indicators are based on the random last variable they provide no useful information.

 

Also, everything I've read seems to indicate that there is no way to influence the value of LCN stocks by game play other than story missions and one random event. There was a great deal of speculation early on that tends to get repeated, but any thread that follows through ends up concluding there is no effect on the stock prices.

 

Driving down the price of a rival stock through manipulating the random fluctuations appears to have no effect on the value of rival companies.

 

In general, the random fluctuations of the stock prices tend to even out, but yes, any stock can take a sudden turn in one direction and run with it for a while. For expensive stocks you'd hardly notice the difference, but for the really cheap stock the apparent trend can lead to some sudden changes - I'm counting on that as part of this strategy.

Edited February 9, 2014 by OrionSR

[fnxrak]

Yeah I'm guessing the only way will be by checking how the stocks will behave in a session and going back to a previous save and hope they will behave the same way, and it's like they say buy low sell high. Anyway if you use correctly the stocks mentioned on the links I posted you will most probably have more than enough to reach the max money as the game has a max value that you can't go over. Hell I passed the game and now I'm trying to spend the most money possible to aply the last assasination and I still got the random event available also and even so I almost for sure will reach taht max value of

$2.147.483.647

 

[Darth_Starkiller]

Just invest in FlyUS or AirEmu, then go to the airport and start blowing up every plane that isn't owned by the company that you invested in.

[Vanto]

You can rob stores, Ammu-Nations, Securicars, make taxi fares, ATM robberies...

[KeepCalm and CarryGun]

In agreement with the posts above, In my experience, blowing up ingame assets of companies to affect their rival's stocks has little or no effect on LCN. And, as stated above, LCN values seem to reset themselves, and appear to be a bit random and useless. You can jump through elaborate hoops, but it's 45 second window coupled with the slow method of selling shares makes it a no-brainer.

 

BawSaq on the other hand, can earn you some cash. I made an extra 10,000,000 for each character after the Big Score by simply investing in one stock and waiting.

 

You have to wait in real time tho, took a few RL days. If you haven't made the most you can from Lester's missions, this could help you get some cash.

[OrionSR]

When I'm trying to manipulate the random variations in my favor I can't really stop myself from trying to identify trends in the market. My gut feeling is that any trends I see are an illusion created by my mind because that's what human brains do. Either way, reloading the same save over and over again always produces different results. If you want to take a chance on a stock then buy it first and reload if the stock moves the wrong way.

 

Someone tipped me off to delaying the assassination missions so I was able to max out my cash on my first game using one of the guides that you linked. But the topic at hand was making lots of money without the assassinations. I've also read a few reports from players who are not able to take advantage of the BAWSAQ investments because they aren't online. This strategy could also be employed by players that don't maximize the Big Score payoff. With my current bankroll I might be able to max out my cheapest stock at rock bottom prices and have max cash on hand to play with, if I don't run into too many max cash issues in the process.

[Mokrie Dela]

I've been trying to use the stocks to get more money, and i have about 30M as M and F (no assassinations done and this was before the first heist.

Now trying to do it as trevor and the stock market has stopped working all together. Ponsonbys has been at the same negative amount since i invested, Los Santos Customs, and a couple of others too.

Hawk and Little, while so reliable before, is not budging at all.

I got some success with Vapid, which was down -17%, and i cashed out at +25 or something. It's a grind, but i hate, absolutely hate, GTA V's mindset of "complete the game" to get ANYTHING decent. I hate how everyone's solution to getting money is "complete the game then do the assassination missions."

If i can get T up to 30M (he's not even at 1 atm thanks to the joke that this game is) then i'll do the assassination missions etc.

This whole game is flawed imo. It's a grind to make money if you want any before the final mission - seriously, who plays on after 100%ing the game? There's no point lol

I'd much rather it do what pretty much every other game does - give you rewards throughout. Instead it feels like the game punishes you for not finishing it straight away.

Anyone know how the hell you can get the stock market to "wake up"? Does it freeze once the lester missions open up?

[fnxrak]

A lot of people play beyond 100% in GTA games because the game isn't just about 100%, if was like that I would have completed it in a couple of days. The real interest about the game is going beyond what the programers have made possible for you to complete, is about the free roam in the game, is about getting stuff that you are not supposed to, is about making your own challenges.

I get it the game lacks a bit of this because it's too damn scripted but we have to think outside the box with these games. Just look at GTA San Andreas it's been 10 years and yet things are still being discovered, because some of us are trying to go beyond the game, beyond the script, beyond the programing, but this won't be accomplished in a couple of months, hopefully it will take more than 10 years to find out what the game can offer, or else people are just going to stop playing the game and having fun with it, it will just stay inside the cover gaining dust.

Is that really what you want????

For me I really hope that in a couple of years I still have the urge to mess around with this game.

Now for not being completely off-topic, there are a lot of ways that have been mentioned in this topic to win money, some are very good and win a reasonable amount of money others not, but that doesn't mean they are not valid. Again I go back to San Andreas until someone found a really fast way to win money, it was hell to get max money, and even so the ways to get fast money were based on how lucky you are.

So R* decided to give us a chance to win money fast and you are complainting about it?! What the hell do you want for them to give money from time to time, what's the fun in that. They give the option to buy stocks, try and do that in real life and see how much do you earn. If the stocks were to be predictable it would definetely loose the fun of it.

The way you described your stock problem, seems to not being frozen at all. If some stocks work the others also work, maybe they just don't change for some time. Anyway most gaming glitches are due to extensive time in one session, so I would advice you to turn off the console 1st for a couple of minutes and if that doesn't work, for a couple of hours.

Edited February 10, 2014 by fnxrak

[Robbie1234567890]

well you can make 1 million dollars an hour IN REAL TIME not game time, by diving to that underwater habitat? looks like a submarine I think some websites call it a oil platform. but its off the southwest coast between the Ocean Tennis Court and the Beach with the Ferris Wheel. Use the red Boat that is docked by the yellow submersible to search for it because you get scuba gear with that when you jump in the water. that way you don't run out of air. you get 25,000 dollars . every saved game and be sure to log out of the PSN network if you have a PS3 otherwise it will hang when you try to reload after each save. I have calculated it takes about 90 seconds to 2 minutes to do a cycle get 25,000 package then save game then reload from that save, The BAWSAQ stock market is useless, I don't think its based on user actions either because I invested like 180 Million in BRUTE stock and it never changed the value, I did earn alot from the rising Sprunk stock then it just collapsed like a week after phenomenal returns . it stayed at 4.50 a share. the LCN seems to always lose money once you get over like 3 million dollars invested in it. so that totally sucks!

 

 

oh and if you find the sunken oil platform submarine thingy and there is no package by the hatch the 25,000 dollars save the game and reload it and it will be there. also don't forget to log out of the PSN network before you load the GTA5. otherwise the quick reloads will not reload and you will have to quit the entire game and start over

Edited February 11, 2014 by Robbie1234567890

[Mokrie Dela]

I have absolutely no idea why but I saw that Whizz was dropping

 

So I invested so of Michael and franklins money in it

 

[Youtube]

Is the result.

Haven't done any lester missions either.

[Detective Phelps]

I got $750 million from the "Pisswasswer incident".

 

The stock market provides many opportunities, and when it is time, you have to strike. There are also other methods, like the armoured truck robberies, and that drug deal gone wrong at the Chilliad state wilderness.

[lol232]

I got 100 million before the final heist. There's a trick for that.

Edited February 12, 2014 by lol232

[OrionSR]

I got 100 million before the final heist. There's a trick for that.

Would you care to share? I need close to 8 million before this random exploit starts to be more efficient than reloading hidden packages, and that's looking like a 7 hour grind for each character.

 

Googling "Pisswasswer incident" brought up no results at all, which was kind of interesting in itself.

 

I was uncomfortable describing a normal stock based on only 2 examples so I started a few new games to get some more data. I'm having a lot of problems getting all the way through to escaping the cops with Franklin so I can finally check the market; the game has a nasty habit of freezing during any of the 3 major scene changes. But if I do manage to make it that far there's a reasonably good chance of finding a stock or two in the 3.50 range so it doesn't take too long to find the minimum price. Five more "normal" stocks, BurgerShot, VanillaUnicorn, GoPostal, BeanMachine and GruppeSechs (I doubt it matters), all showed pretty much the same traits as WorldwideFM and Hijak. They bottomed out at 3.42 (+/-0.01) and could vary by at least +/-0.10 per interval.

 

I didn't always have enough data points to observe a change of 0.11 for all of these stocks since they started pretty close to minimum. I get the impression that 0.11 is more rare - like you need the perfect dice roll else it rounds down to 10. I'm thinking something like: INT((random between -1.0 and 1.0)*11)/100. I've been observing a few more expensive stocks and have seen no evidence that any stock can vary by more than 0.11 unless acted upon by missions or events.

 

I also kept an eye on the RichardsMajestic stock long before the missions had a chance to tweak it and observed a few changes of 0.10, but the price was far too expensive to test for the minimum. I've come to the conclusion that if I want to find an unusual stock with a lower minimum or high variance I'm going to need to take a closer look at other mission stocks after they've been tweaked, but the chances that one of those will be a really cheap stock are pretty slim.

Edited February 13, 2014 by OrionSR

[OrionSR]

Maximum Shares Owned = 2,147,483,647

 

I think I read about this somewhere else but forgot about it until all of Micheal's shares disappeared while I was trying to shove his 210 million bankroll through the assassination missions. One of the BAWSAQ stocks was so low that he went over the limit without me realizing it. When I reloaded a previous save I got less favorable returns on the previous investment and didn't have a problem the second time. When I finished the investment program I was able to recreate this glitch with my cheap LCN stock. I didn't try to refine the measurement beyond 2.11 billion shares works just fine, but buy a little more and they all vanish.

 

Starting with 201 million for Franklin and Trevor, and 210M for Michael, the end result was max cash, plus near max stocks (2.1B) for RichardsMajestic starting near 1.63 and now climbing, 2.1 billion shares of WorldWideFM starting near 3.42, and between 637 million (F) and 1.8 billion (M) stashed away in VanillaUnicorn stocks - one of my most expensive so it's fairly stable.

[unfairlane]

I am playing through for the 3rd time now, taking it real slow. Right now Michael is living up in Sandyshore in Trevors place.

 

Michael has 12 Billions, the other two 150-180 Millions each. The guys has allready bought up most of the properties, like the 150 mill golfclub.

Focused primarely on Michael, he`s the one who needs big money to buy up cinemas & golfcourse. To give him something to play with early in the game I started up this KIFFLOM-traffic. Then 2 Mills become 3 a.s.on...

 

My "trick" is to pick some stocks of low value, (like $1-6) observe their min and max, buy up one of each of these stocks so I can easily watch them in my portifolio and go all in when they are near their bottom-line.

 

This works most of the time, but to avoid big losses I do backup-saves, one or moore. Or I buy up one stock, makes a new save, then restart the game from the old gamesave and buy up another stock and saves this separately. On top of this (early in the game) I also make saves where I just cash out my money and keep them on my account, in case all my shopping goes wrong.

 

And; when they increases, I might og all out on lets say 48% and make a new (overwrite an old) save, just to secure my profit. Then 4-12 hours later I can og back and check if they have continued raising or if I did right. Got it?

 

Had a 2960% payoff on some stocks that hit $0,11 once, that makes you feel good

Edited February 17, 2014 by unfairlane

[RiderNiggah]

Can anybody please tell me how to get BAWSAQ ? ( Down for maintence ) and I'm not logged into anything. Just a ps3 from the box and gta v ( NO online stuff) is that maybe the problem ?

[WildBrick142]

Can anybody please tell me how to get BAWSAQ ? ( Down for maintence ) and I'm not logged into anything. Just a ps3 from the box and gta v ( NO online stuff) is that maybe the problem ?

You need online connection to be able to use BAWSAQ.

[NoxiousBacon]

Bawsaq are for people who have an internet connection like me. If you want money then you should buy the scrapyard and then cause a whole load of chaos, you should make some money out of that and you can also invest in insurance company's. I ended up making well over 500k at the scrapyard after using a tank to destroy cars. Since it worked for me it should work for you. I have $1.2 billion in single player for Michael and Franklin since I came out with $39 million in the last heist. If you did the Lester invertsmenst properly then you should be able to make well over a billion. I simply just searched up a guide to follow and within the day I got $1.2 billion.

And if you started again and thought Trevor was a piece of shot you didn't care about then you should kill him and get all his money. I didn't do it because it just isn't gta v without 3 characters.

And what's the point of wanting money? I know I have over a billion but now I still have well over $900k which I don't use since I bought all properties. Online I have $7million which I play more then sp since there isn't much to do on single player.

[Saintdestroyer]

There are some new assassinations coming, so sit tight.

[RiderNiggah]

You guys are lucky to AFFORD online congrats, thanks anyway

[pilscy]

so basically if you complete the game and didn't invest in stocks during the game thats it? thats some real advance coding...

 

they had reoccurring events in sa, 4, tbogt and its not in this game .... for the stock market of all things.

 

smh

[kapnkyle]

At the start of the game use Franklin, go find a couple cash secret packages. The highest is 25k and 16k respectively. With that 40k invest in whiz on bawsaq. It will always drop down into the cents for per share price. Buy. Wait a few hours real time. The stock will work is way back up to 3 dollars or wherever it peaks sell. Using this method With each character and the first 2 assassination mmissions, I had maxed out my cash With Franklin and Micheal at 2.1 billion. (@35% game completion) trevor takes a little more work to make the Max as he isn't available until 1/3 through the story. By doing it this way I am able to play most of the story with all the cash you will ever need.