I wrote this mainly because I could not find any current Guides that tell you, plain and simply, how to make QUICK money in this game. Using the steps outlined below, I was able to turn my initial $100K starting funds into $410K in the 1st QUARTER!

In addition, you will achieve several milestones in the skill-department, as well as increase the loyalty of numerous other characters in multiple states. This will help snowball you into a more conventional approach taken in other Guides, namely settling down and preparing for long-term investment in, and eventual ownership of, companies in the game.

A brief summary of the Strategy below is as follows:

STEP 1 - Identify ALL characters in your current state that have an Ambition to buy Company Stocks AND are willing to pay 100% of the Stake Price (i.e. full Market Value of those shares)

STEP 2 - After tabulating the total number of shares by Company, make your deals and purchase the stocks BELOW Market Value (i.e. get a %-discount when making your purchases)

STEP 3 - Sell your purchased/discounted shares to the Characters identified in Step 1, who will pay you more than you purchased the stocks for in Step 2; once you complete this for all the characters in one state, move to the next state and repeat the process -- you can easily travel and make all these deals in at least 3 states every quarter...

Mode: Sandbox Campaign
World Size: Small World (only option ATM)
Game Start Time: Start from the bottom (initial funds are $100K)
Opponents: 1 opponent (can choose more or none, I just wanted a gauge on how I was doing)
Difficulty: Small fish (your opponent starts with same initial funds as you, i.e. level playing field)
Win Condition: Wealth
End Date: Inifinitely (my choice, but choose what you want)

Start Game...

This section is for complete beginners. If you already understand how to navigate to, sort, and identify Ambitions, then you might want to skip ahead to the actual strategy below.

Ambitions in this game are the immediate goals that EVERY character has. They are randomly generated, they come in several varieties, and each character only has ONE ambition at any given time.

In order to see the list of characters in the game, and their associated Ambition at any given time, follow these steps:
- Using the UI-menu at the bottom, click on 'Distinctions and Achievements' (4th from the LEFT)
- Now click on 'Ratings' (top RIGHT corner)
- This will take you to the 'Characters List'

The list you are viewing by default will show ALL characters, in ALL states, sorted by 'Wealth'. The Ambition of each character on the list is shown in the 6th-column (from the LEFT); by default, this column is sorted by 'All Ambitions'.

If you change the Ambition's-column-sort to 'Doable' (click on the little arrow to the left-or-right at the top of the column), the list of characters will shorten by a large amount -- the characters that REMAIN on the list have an Ambition that you, the player, can help them realize currently. All the characters that left the list still have an Ambition, but you can not currently help them achieve it.

All the Ambitions are represented by an icon to help you quickly identify the character's general ambition. This icon will further be defined by a PLUS (+) or a MINUS (-) symbol in the lower-right-corner. The plus-symbol indicates the character wishes to acquire the item; the minus-symbol indicates the character wishes to get rid of the item.

The Ambitions are as follows (listed in no particular order):
* Company Shares (icon will also indicate type of company, e.g. Oil Refining, Oil Producing, etc)
* Alcohol/Tobacco
* Pictures (i.e. paintings)
* Coins
* Weapons
* Antiques
* Trophies
* Horses
* Yachts
* Houses
* Election Campaigns
* Director (i.e. CEO of a Company)

The symbol you are looking at will only relay the general Ambition of the character. If you want to see the details of what they are looking to get rid of or to gain, simply RIGHT-click on the character's row. This will pull up a pop-up menu, with the following options:
* Deal
* Dirt
* Use Agent
* Borrow Money
* Ambition
* Information

Click on 'Ambition' in this pop-up menu. This will finally give you all the details you need to know about the character's current Ambition.

Now, other Guides will mention that you can make some quick-cash by finding characters that want to sell Trophies, for example. You buy the trophy below-market-value, and then you can immediately identify another character who has an Ambition to buy Trophies. Sell it to them for a profit, Voila! Yes, but the market-value is random, at least at the beginning of the game, and most (all?) items will NOT sell for any more than you initially paid for them -- the exception are items purchased below market-value at auctions. This strategy will only gain you a character's Loyalty, at least in the early quarters of the game.

We want to focus on the characters that have an Ambition to BUY Company Shares. So find any character with a Company-icon that also has PLUS-symbol on it. Right-click on their row to pull up the pop-up menu, and now click on their Ambition in the pop-up menu. Their Ambition-details will display the following:

Company stockholder
I am looking to purchase (name of company) company's shares from (state that company is located in). If you help me, I will be grateful to you...

Deal Terms
Number of Shares: a VERY specific number of shares the character wants to buy
Market Price: the price of those shares, if you charge full market-value
Stake Price: slider, by default is always set to ZERO (see below)
Loyalty to you: based on Stake Price, how much the character's loyalty to you increases/decreases

When reviewing these details, the Stake Price is incredibly important to pay attention to. If you look closely at the slider-bar BEFORE making any adjustments to it, it will be partially to fully highlighted in a light GREEN color. If the GREEN-highlighted-area is not covering the ENTIRE slider-bar, this character will NEVER pay you FULL market-value for the item you are trying to sell to them. Instead, you will gain more loyalty. Loyalty may prove useful to you later in the game, but for now, you want to ignore this character's Ambition -- you will most likely lose money in dealing with them.

Instead, for the strategy outlined below, we want to focus on the characters who have an Ambition to buy stock shares AND are willing to pay the FULL market-value of the Stake Price...

So here is where the rubber meets the road. Now that we know how to identify the details of a character's Ambition, it is time to start turning that information into money. I found a good-old-fashioned scrap pad and pen incredibly helpful at this stage; if you are happier with EXCEL, than open that. You will need something to list and tabulate some data later on.

STEP 1 - Gather the Ambition Details
Using the character list, change the column-sort of 'All states" to whatever state YOUR character was generated in on Day 1. You can only make deals in the state you CURRENTLY are located in -- you can do business in ANY state, but you have to be in it in order to do so -- we will come back to this later.

Leave the Ambition-column sorted by 'All ambitions'. Starting from the top of the character list, start scrolling down to the first character that has an Ambition to BUY (i.e. PLUS-symbol on the icon) any type of Company Shares. Once identified, right-click to their Ambition-details. The VERY FIRST THING to check is whether this character is willing to pay FULL market-value for whatever their STAKE PRICE is -- as mentioned above, this will be indicated by the STAKE PRICE slider-scale being fully highlighted in GREEN.

If the STAKE PRICE is NOT fully highlighted in GREEN, simply click 'X Refuse' in the lower-right corner to close this character's details and move onto the next character in the list. There is no penalty for doing this -- you have just closed the window. You have not refused to help the character with their Ambition at a later time, if you so choose.

If the STAKE PRICE is FULLY highlighted in GREEN, then you want to take note of this character's details. Write down or type the following:
* name of the Company the character wants shares in
* total number of shares the character wants -- the number you make note of needs to be the exact number the character wants -- when it comes time to sell these shares to the character, the character will not buy even a single share more or less than they indicated in their Ambition details
* (optional) Market Price -- this amount indicates the FULL market-value of this number of the company's shares, if bought with no discounts. I found this useful to gauge how much I could afford, especially when you start adding up the amounts that multiple characters want in the same company

Now rinse-and-repeat. Continue down the list, noting the details of ALL characters in the entire state that want to purchase Company Shares and are willing to pay 100% of the STAKE PRICE.

Once you have all their details, start tabulating the totals by COMPANY. In the end, you will know exactly how many TOTAL shares you need to purchase in each company, and if you jotted down the optional Market Price mentioned above, you will also have a rough idea of how much those TOTAL shares will cost.

STEP 2 - Buy the Shares

Go into the map, click on your state, and then click on the Company you want to start buying shares in. Ideally, you want to make one big and complete purchase -- one that fulfills the total of ALL relevant character Ambitions -- from one current shareholder in the company. And since you start the game with only $100K, you should work your way UP your list, from the smallest TOTAL (in terms of Market Price or cost) to the largest. And you can spend every last dollar you have on the deals, because you have guaranteed buyers with Ambitions waiting for you to come back to them.

TIPS:
* Influence determines who you can even start a deal with -- if a shareholder in the company has a little padlock-symbol in the lower-right of their character portrait, their Influence is too high for you -- move on to another shareholder or return when you have more influence over that character

* Every character, even you, has two Characteristics or traits associated with them; some traits will help you make great deals in YOUR favor or vice-versa. Traits in your target-shareholder that can help your deal include Wasteful and Calm; traits that can hurt your deal include Fussy and Charismatic. Some traits can go either way -- Alarmist can give you an amazing discount before the deal even begins or conversely, add to the expense of every share. Avoid shareholders with negative traits if possible, and if not, know that you can still get a good deal -- much of this is RNG.

* Find a shareholder with a big enough percentage in the Company to make the TOTAL deal with, based on the TOTAL shares you need to acquire for all the characters you are trying to sell back to. You do not want to have to rely on making multiple deals in your favor with multiple characters in the same company. I never had a problem with this, since at this early stage of the game, you will be surprised that 72K in shares may only represent 4% of a company, as an example

* Buy LOW... doh! The whole point of this strategy is to get the total amount shares you need BELOW the Market Price. If you pay even 1% more than Market Price, you can NOT make a profit from selling those shares back through character Ambitions, which will never pay more than Market Price. The success of a deal is largely dependent on some RNG-needle swinging back-and-forth, so don't be shy about sacrificing some percentage of the deal's success in order to take a bit more of a percentage off the price of the shares.

* Don't be TOO greedy... Greed is good to a certain extent, but if you're making decent deals, don't risk destroying a deal by trying one more round with a further discount. I personally used 3% as my base-line for a decent deal. If I got that, I moved on -- anything less and I tried negotiating for another round, if available.

* About save-scumming... It's your game, and I don't care how you choose to play. If you tried to push a deal too far, or you got shut down in Round 1, then you decide how to proceed. You can try another shareholder, or you can wait the number of days indicated to try another deal with the initial shareholder, or you can just re-load your save-game and try again from scratch. You own it, you decide...

STEP 3 - Sell!

Now that you have purchased the exact amount of shares you needed to fulfill the Ambitions of however many characters, return to the Character List menu, sort by the state you are in, but under the Ambitions-column, switch it to 'Doable". This will only list the characters that you can actually help achieving their Ambition, in this case owning an exact number of shares in a specific company.

The characters you are looking for will have the same Company Shares icon with a PLUS-symbol in their Ambitions-column. But BE CAREFUL! You will also come across characters with the correct icon and willingness to purchase that specific company's shares, but their STAKE PRICE will NOT be FULLY highlighted in GREEN -- these are the characters that you should NOT have noted down in your original tabulations of Step 1. If you try moving their STAKE PRICE slider all the way to the RIGHT, they will pay SOMETHING for those shares but it won't be the Market Price. So unless you got those shares at an incredibly discounted price in Step 2, you are about to lose money if you sell them to these characters.

The characters you need have the icon and plus-symbol, and when you open their Ambition-details, their STAKE PRICE is FULLY highlighted in GREEN. And when you slide the STAKE PRICE all the way right, these characters are paying you FULL Market Price. After you have moved the slider all the way to the right, you can click on 'Finish' in the lower-left corner.

Repeat as necessary until you have sold all the shares you purchased in Step 2. If you're not sure if you sold them all back, the quickest way is to glance at the bottom UI. Your 'Cash' and your 'Wealth' will be equal when you no longer have any shares left to sell. If your 'Cash' is LESS THAN your 'Wealth', you either have some cash tied up in additional stock and/or something else (e.g. Antiques, Trophies, etc)

After you have fulfilled all the Stock-Ambitions in your starting state, you can now move to another state. Simply repeat the above steps in the second state, and the money will just start piling up. In my own experience, I have implemented this strategy across three different states, and I am currently holding $410K on March 15 in Quarter 1 of the game.

In addition, every time you help characters achieve their Ambition, you are helping yourself get that much closer to Skill points. I believe you get one after helping 5 characters, then another after helping 15, and so on. I won't get into how you should allocate those points here. Personally, I put all 3 points into Investments, which dramatically increased my quarterly income based on the strategy above, even though I am currently making $0 from dividends.

And all those characters that you have helped have become slightly more loyal (i.e. friendlier) to you. So if they are a politician, you may get their help a bit more in securing a contract -- or other activities I hear the developers are working on in the under-developed Politics of the game. Or if they are a shareholder in a company you want to invest in later, you should find making a deal with them a bit easier, as well as requiring much less influence.


CONCLUSION

I only wrote this to help those, like I myself was, struggling with making money in the very early stages of the game, so I hope this helps :)