I Still Don’t Understand The Stock Market After Playing Insider Trading

In Insider Trading, number must go up, but number must also go down. The roguelike deckbuilder, which was released earlier in February, is recognizable as inspired by Balatro—the wildly popular, wacky poker game that sold at least 7 million copies since its release in 2024. Like Balatro, Insider Trading is centered around a deck of ever-changing cards pulled from a buildable collection. Make a great deck, and you’re more likely to get it to work in your favor. You’re not making a poker hand in Insider Trading, though. You’re working the stock market. 

Each day, Insider Trading has you draw a new hand of cards. You can either buy stocks or skip a day—a decision you’ll make after looking at your drawn cards. The cards all have different modifiers that impact the stock market prices, like bringing the price up by a few dollars. Some of the cards delete ones next to it. Others will decrease the share price by 10 percent, but only if it’s in a certain slot.

You’re doing this daily for a week, hoping to reach a target dollar amount. You earn tokens that let you buy pills (lol) and other perks that modify the cards and the ways they work together. You need the stock prices to go up, so you can make tons of money. But you also don’t want to make the price go up too high, where you price yourself out of the market. You’ll want to crash the market, at times, by selling all your stocks. Then you can buy more once the price is low. 

I started playing Insider Trading with the Balatro mindset, in which I wanted the stock prices to go as high as possible. But that’s the wrong approach, which makes my brain itch. The strategy behind buying and selling is quite complicated with all these different cards and modifiers. I can’t really say that I totally understand what’s going on, but that’s what makes Insider Trading a strange challenge for me. It doesn’t feel good to watch the stock market prices go down, but it’s key to getting the number to go up enough. 

Insider Trading doesn’t have its hooks in me the same way Balatro does, because of the aforementioned confusion underlying everything I do, but I’m still finding it satisfying to play. That’s partly due to the retro-inspired interface and its rhythmic soundtrack. The cards activate—a tactile, muffled click—alongside the beat of the music in a very satisfying way. It makes it easy to hit the trade button even when things could go very badly.I imagine this is exactly the interface that day traders on Wall Street are using to do whatever they do there.

It’s a good time for Balatro-like games. Insider Trading is among a group of similar games—at least, with that Balatro feel—including Clover Pit, the roguelite slot machine game; Dice A Million, the roguelike dice roller; Chark, the chess roguelike; Wordatro!, the roguelike wordgame; and Omelet You Cook, the cooking roguelike. Anything can be a roguelike, it seems.

Insider Trading has a demo available to play. Otherwise, it’s $10.95 on Steam until next week. (It just came out on Feb. 18, so this is an offer tied to its release date.) I don’t know much about insider trading, but Insider Trading is probably a lot more fun than real insider trading which usually comes with jail time.