If you're looking to learn the basics of the stock market, play Railroad Tycoon 2 -- I can't speak for the original (didn't play it), but the sequel at least can teach you quite a bit.
The stock market aspects of the Railroad Tycoon franchise were what set it apart from all the other "Tycoon" games to follow. It allowed you to play the game on a variety of different levels. You could just focus on building a railroad network. You could focus on building a successful business. Or my person favorite, you could focus on building a personal fortune without any regard for the other two objectives. I spent many an hour as a kid trying to build a fortune be strategically destroying my virtual businesses.
It's a great illustration of why insider trading can be so damaging. There were so many ways to be extremely destructive overall, but which you could turn into huge amounts of money for yourself by trading your own stock appropriately.
Exactly like that. And you could usually arrange it so the tanking was temporary, so you could then cover your short, buy a bunch of extra stock, and then bring the business back to life. For example, you could stop all your trains for a while, let the lack of revenue cause massive losses, then once your stock price was sufficiently low, restart the trains and resume business.
Oh, absolutely! In some scenarios you could enrich yourself by driving the business into the ground and manipulating the stock, and then let one of your hapless competitors merge with the failing railroad while you founded a new one.
Railroad Tycoon 2 had an interesting story by itself: It was originally not named Railroad Tycoon at all, as it was built by a very different company, PopTop Software, based in a St Louis suburb. Close to release they managed to get the license, and IMO the name recognition really helped a very good game.
The same team moved on to make Tropico and Railroad Tycoon 3, both of which made plenty of money. They didn't do quite so well after that, and what was left of the studio was relocated and eaten by Firaxis.
Good game :) I played this about a year ago. Brought back good memories. I remember thinking sod it and laid a track straight across the map. The huge risk paid off. I love these types of games.
Capitalism II is also an interesting one with a stock market component.
