How to Make Stock and Real Estate Investing Decisions

[buells]

At the outset of the game, there is usually a big rush to buy up land and build apartments and commercial buildings. Obviously, you want to build commercial buildings in cities with very high demand relative to supply. I find it tends to be best to build them as close as possible to the stock exchange (CBD) since building elsewhere leaves you vulnerable to competition if the city gets overbuilt.

On the residential side of things, I find that certain cities become very heavily developed while others do not. I'm not really sure why this is and would appreciate advice on how to determine which cities will be targets for residential development over the long term.

Buying up these properties at the beginning of the game is kind of a no brainer because the majority of the time a property boom develops. Moreover, GDP growth will boom for several years as companies invest heavily to tap profitable markets. Sometimes a severe depression follows, but the boom can go on for a couple of decades before this happens.

Accordingly, as companies pick low hanging fruit, they have tremendous profitability which is not priced in at the beginning of the game. Thus investing in a few stocks at the outset almost guarantees a big return over time until the markets start to reach maturity.

What I would like to know is how to determine which AI companies make good investments. Is P/E or P/B a better indicator for certain industries? I know P/E doesn't work very well for firms that have huge cash or stock investments, but does it work after adjusting for those? Do are brands, tech, or real estate particularly good predictors of future success? If so, how should I value the AI's equity as a multiple of the book value of its assets?

[counting]

Since real estate AIs are relatively few (2 to 4 normally even at 30 AIs), hence they tend to cluster their small-town like buildings outside the same high population and high demand city perimeter from the very beginning. So usually this leads to over-supply in some cities and let other cities without competition. Normally if players don't invest heavily on real estate, it's relatively irrelevant which cities to build since their profit margin is just too low to have genuine impact (since they are mostly for boosting traffic index only). However if you wish to create your own real estate empire, IMO it's better to spread out in different cities than put all the eggs in one basket.

As for stock market, P/E rating or P/B rating aren't that useful in most cases, since it's quite deceiving for AI profit. And if AI corporations have their own stock investment, it would be even less obvious how they actually perform. A very crude and easy way to "predict" the performance is to check the profit graph over-time in corporation detail, also check and see if they have "star products". Usually an AI corporation who has several products that are extreme profitable means it has monopoly on market, and guarantee to perform well. Otherwise you will have to wait for economic cycle to buy at recession period. (Or if you have alternative stock market off, you could also manipulate price, but it's close to exploit than legit business strategies)