There’s something alluring about high finance, isn’t there? Mostly, I suppose, it’s the promise of generating absolutely enormous amounts of money for very little actual work, but it’s undeniable that the industry—such as it is—has gone out of its way to cloak itself in a certain mystique.
The suits, the jargon, the barking into telephones in smoke-filled rooms: what is ultimately just a building full of boys who did boring degrees and have too much money sure does manage to make itself appealing and mysterious, like they were a cabal of sorcerers or something.
All this is to explain why I continue to find myself suckered into any and every game that lets me pretend to be one of these masters of the universe, like the excellent Stonks-9800 and, now, the Steam Next Fest demo for Insider Trading. Much like its namesake, Insider Trading is fun, profitable, and victimless, and I strongly recommend you give it a try.
Because it’s Balatro. Someone went and made Balatro but stock trading and, friends, I fear for my ability to get anything done ever again. This is a roguelike deckbuilder (as are most games in 2025) with a wobbly, warbly, CRT-style interface that sees you assemble absurd multipliers out of painstakingly composed hands of cards, all while using a meta-currency to amass perks that change the flow of the game, cut away at or add cards to your deck, and to optimise your hand.
It’s not poker-themed, though. Where Balatro had you assemble real-life poker hands to generate your score, Insider Trading just pulls 10 cards from your deck and triggers them in whatever order you leave them in your hand. The goal is to amass enough money (points) to hit a certain target by the end of a week: $1,200 by Friday, $2,000 by next Friday, that kind of thing.
At the start of a turn you can either skip—if you think things will go badly—or trade, at which point you’ll buy the maximum number of stocks you can with whatever cash you have and wait for your assembled hand to affect the stock price. Assuming you did your maths right, you’ll sell off those stocks for more money than you started with. Though, hopefully you won’t increase the stock price to something higher than you can afford.
It starts off simple enough. You might pull six cards that increase the stock price by anywhere from 1% to 5% each, and another four that decrease it by the same amount, but things quickly get weirder. For instance: This card will add or subtract 10% to the price only if it’s played first, this card will delete other cards of a certain suit if you place it adjacent to them, this card will buff other suits by 1.5x each time it’s triggered.
I made full use of that last one. Every time I amassed enough tokens to buy a new perk, I stacked on another ‘trigger your first card three times’ and let it ride, amassing enough of them to trigger my first card 12x every turn and almost obviating the entire rest of my hand.
It worked out pretty well, right up until I triggered an event based around shorting, where suddenly it became necessary to decrease the price rather than increase it to make money. It rather made me and my deck composed entirely around buffing the price up a little bit redundant, and I quickly found myself reduced to penury as my fortune.
Sound good? Of course it does. So I definitely recommend checking out Insider Trading’s demo while you have a chance. Also, you’ll always have a chance, because although its demo is featured in Steam Next Fest, it’s not a Next Fest-exclusive demo. I wouldn’t dally though, the market waits for no one.
