Stock in Trade

From ZedCo, makers of such fine online entertainment products as Rotisserie League War Crimes Tribunal™ and FoodWasters Extravaganza™, comes the kind of experience that can not only transform the way we play games online, but the way we live.  StockBlock™ is the new gaming system that allows everyone to take part in the sheer joy of dealing in high-level financial instruments — even if you don’t have the cash to play the stock market!

Everyone knows that privatization is the wave of the future.  Seventeen out of ten experts at the American Enterprise Institute agreed that when it comes to important life decisions like planning your retirement, financing your child’s education, or preventing the kind of illnesses that could cost your employer valuable productivity, the stock market is the way to go.  But the stubborn fact remains that only 47% of Americans own any stock at all!  Yes, more than half of this country, probably due to laziness or lack of information, has not yet realized that giving money to huge corporations is the most secure way to make your money work for you.  Did you know that more people have cats than have investment income?  And cats are only a recognized financial instrument in Italy!

Well, StockBlock™ changes all that.  By installing our software and entering a simple set of data concerning your bank accounts, personal identity, and whereabouts at all times, you can invest in our fun, exciting, colorfully animated ‘virtually real’ stock market — without having to know anything at all about how the real stock market works!  Our crack team of designers have created a fantasy exchange that will appeal to you no matter what your interests are.  Like baseball?  Invest your money in the five-time champion StockBlock™ Super Batsters!  Enjoy Game of Thrones?  Put your nest egg in DragonCo!  Willing to spend money on anything as long as it has the word “Mommy” in front of it?  Why not consider putting some much-needed capital in babyproofing startup Zootle Kadoodle?

Of course, fantasy stock market simulations have been around for years.  But StockBlock™ isn’t just a rehash of old ideas.  For one thing, our graphics engine was designed by legendary toy craftsman Stig Orksson, who brings the game a thrilling 8-bit Lego-block throwback sensibility that our marketing department insists is all the rage these days. For another, you don’t have to do any research at all; we’ve partnered with leading data-mining companies to sift carefully through your tweets, Facebook likes, and YouPorn searches to make sure you invest in the made-up companies our algorithm guesses you would enjoy looking at the most!  And while we know that low-value demographics don’t have the financial resources to play the real stock market in a way that would keep our CFO from laughing at you, that doesn’t mean we won’t take your real money — and give you real in-game rewards when your savvy investments pay off!

Did your investment in Soda Pop Holdings LLC pay off when its management brutally crushed a labor strike in Myanmonesia or wherever the hell they buy their corn syrup?  Then be prepared to receive a shiny virtual “UNION BUSTER” badge!  Did you double your profits when we decided that one company we made up was going to get bought by another company we made up?  Then watch your mailbox, because a 5% off coupon for products offered by one of our many corporate partners might be on the way, depending on whether or not you bought the Prime shipping option at registration!  Did you pick just the right tech startup with just the right incomprehensible mission statement at just the right time?  Then share in their imaginary wealth with an imaginary dividend check, printed on real paper!

But the fun doesn’t stop there!  If you’re feeling like a high roller with your cigarette money, why not dig deep into our wide selection of in-game purchases?  Aside from the sign-up cost, monthly subscription rate, transaction fees, and weekly penalties for underperformance, we’ve got plenty of ways for you to spend your real money on our fake investments.  Donate money to one of our made-up institutions of higher learning, and have your name permanently affixed to a virtual library, conference room, or varsity sports arena!  Pay off an e-senator to have one of the imaginary corporations you invest in get a sweetheart deal to relocate to his state!  Pony up some cash to one of our digital tax attorneys to keep the feds from taking 15% of the movie tickets we might give you for achieving some impossibly arbitrary goal!  Dress your avatar in a little football helmet!  No game on the market offers you more ways to spend money than StockBlock™.

Finally, we know the key to any great game is replay value, especially when it comes to people like you who have really boring low-paying jobs that require constant distraction.  That’s why we’re already coming out with one expansion pack after another to ensure that you’ll be playing StockBlock™ until you die, run out of money, or both!  (Please consult our user agreement for details on how your heirs are responsible for paying off any costs you incur after your demise.)  It’s one thing to play the virtual stock market, but by 2016, we hope to have a whole new slate of bogus financial instruments for you to invest your actual money on and feel like a virtual high roller.  Are you interested in fake municipal bonds?  Bogus T-bills?  Ersatz equity futures?  Dummy foreign exchange swaps?  Pseudo-interest rate caps and floors?  Sham exotic derivatives?  Virtual ‘rogue traders’ who will lose your imaginary millions overnight after a malört bender?  We’ll have them all!  You don’t even have to understand them; no one does!  Turn your ready cash into the kind of incomprehensible high-end financial chicanery that ruins entire countries!  No other financial simulation software gives you more chances to spend more of your real money on more types of equity assets than StockBlock™.  And the best part is, since you can’t ever make any actual profit, the tax man will never be able to take a bite out of your winnings.

StockBlock™.  They say money is just numbers…we prove them right.