In GTA 5’s story mode, the real fortune isn’t made pulling off heists: it’s made on the stock market. The five assassination missions Lester Crest hands you are built to send specific companies soaring or crashing. Buy the right stock at the right moment, and all three protagonists can end up billionaires. Here’s the playbook, market by market.
How the GTA 5 Stock Market Works
The game simulates two stock exchanges, both reachable from your characters’ phones or any safehouse computer, under the money and services menu. The first, the LCN (Liberty City National Exchange), is a local, fully offline market. Its prices react directly to what’s happening in your playthrough: scripted missions, companies whose assets you sabotage. It’s the more predictable of the two, which is exactly why the big plays are built here.
The second, the BAWSAQ, is the game’s send-up of the NASDAQ. Unlike the LCN, it’s an online market: it pools activity from the whole community and leans on Rockstar’s servers, which makes it more volatile, more unpredictable, and frequently down for a solo player. The core mechanic is the same on both: buy low, sell high. In practice, you use the fallout of a mission to guess which stock is about to spike.
Lester’s Assassinations, the Money Machine
It’s Franklin that Lester sends into the field for every contract, even though all three protagonists invest alongside him. The principle never changes: take out an executive and his company’s stock tanks while its rival’s climbs. Your job is to bet on the right side before the trigger gets pulled.
The first mission, The Hotel Assassination, targets Brett Lowrey, the CEO of Bilkinton Research: his death sinks Bilkinton and lifts Betta Pharmaceuticals. The catch is that it’s mandatory and comes early in the story, when your bank accounts are empty. So the payoff is token at best. It’s the only one you play during the main story.
The Golden Rule: Finish the Story Before You Shoot
The next four assassinations (Multi Target, Vice, Bus, Construction) are optional. The classic mistake is to knock them out the moment they pop up: at that point you only have a few thousand dollars to invest, and those percentages get applied to pocket change. Save all four for after the Big Score, the story’s final heist, which pays out up to roughly $40 million to each of the three protagonists (go for the Obvious approach and the best crew you can afford, since a bad lineup of gunmen and drivers can gut your take).
With roughly $120 million combined to reinvest across three characters, every assassination becomes a large-scale multiplier. The execution never changes: buy, head home, make a quick save, sleep to advance time, then check the price. If it’s still climbing, repeat; if it starts to slide, reload the save from when it peaked.
The Five-Assassination Cheat Sheet
Here, in order, is the move to make on each mission and the return to aim for. The running total assumes you start the series after the Big Score, with the cash from the final heist.
| Assassination | Stock to buy | Market | Target gain | Running total (per protagonist) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Hotel (mandatory) | Betta Pharmaceuticals (BET) then Bilkinton (BIL) | BAWSAQ then LCN | ~80% (21% on current-gen consoles) then ~80% | low (early game) |
| Multi Target | Debonaire (DEB) then Redwood (RWC) | LCN | ~80% then ~320% | ~$330M |
| Vice | Fruit (FRT) then Facade (FAC) | BAWSAQ | ~50% then ~33% | ~$650M |
| Bus | Vapid (VAP) | BAWSAQ | ~100% | ~$1.3B |
| Construction | GoldCoast (GCD) | LCN | ~90% | ~$2B |
The real turning point is the Multi Target: Lester has a panel of corrupt jurors gunned down, Redwood Cigarettes collapses under the lawsuit and then bounces back by roughly 320%. Pour absolutely everything into it. By the end, each protagonist is aiming for $2 billion, a hair under the $2,147,483,647 ceiling hard-coded into the game.
BAWSAQ Down? The LCN Still Rules
Here’s the most common trap: half the plays above (Betta, Fruit, Facade, Vapid) run through the BAWSAQ, which requires an internet connection. On current versions of the game, that market is often unreachable or frozen, and it varies from one player to the next. Don’t let it hold your playthrough hostage.
The good news is that the two biggest gains are on the LCN: Redwood (roughly 320%) via the Multi Target, and GoldCoast (roughly 90%) via the Construction. That offline market always responds to your missions. Bottom line: run the strategy on the LCN, and treat BAWSAQ profits as a bonus for whenever the market feels like cooperating. If you’re itching for more, our guide to making money in GTA Online covers the other half of the fortune, on the multiplayer side.
This stock market economy is unique to GTA 5’s single-player mode, and one of the reasons the game is still going strong more than a decade after its 2013 launch. That leaves one question: will the stock market come back in GTA 6? Rockstar hasn’t confirmed anything, but the studio loves these parallel money-making systems. For now, Los Santos already has its market open for business.
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