Insider Trading: The game where Balatro meets the stock market

Welcome to the Insider Trading game, where you combine synergies to influence stocks and get rich while doing so. It features an addictive gameplay loop that involves assembling crazy multipliers and optimizing hands to build the momentum needed to reach monetary targets assigned by your boss.

Insider Trading roguelike deckbuilding mechanics are used to find success in market manipulation. The goal is to turn your virtual stock market into a money-making machine, but you will face a whole host of challenges that will test your build.

What is Insider Trading?

The Insider Trading demo puts you in the shoes of an intern, with your goal being to make money from the market by trading stocks. At the end of each Friday, your balance must meet the weekly target set for you. If you fail to reach the target figure, you will be fired (in other words, the run will be over). 

At the beginning of each day, ten cards are drawn from your deck, each of which has different effects that will influence the market. Green cards are categorized as positive cards that boost the market, and red cards are negative cards that decrease market value. Five or more cards of the same color connecting form a combo. All cards in a combo turn shiny and will trigger twice and offer plus two tokens as a bonus.

When the price of the market is expected to rise, hit the trade button, and this will buy as many shares as you can afford using your balance. If you are dealt a bad card combination, you have the option to skip trading for that day to receive ten tokens instead. When the market opens, your cards will be played from left to right, allowing you to turn the tides of market volatility in your favor. Once the cards are done triggering, all your shares will be sold at the new price in the Insider Trading video game, dictated by the influence of your cards. 

When each day is over, you’ll be taken to the aftermarket, where you can choose two new cards to add to your deck. This is where you can start creating interesting builds. The Beartrap card will delete negative Bear cards if it’s adjacent to them. The Calf card adds a one percent price increase, an effect that continues to increase by one percent for every bull card queued, and so on. The shop is also where you acquire pills and perks in exchange for tokens. 

Pills apply a one-time effect with the intention of swinging luck in your favor, and perks are permanent. The cost of pills and perks will increase every week. Examples of perks include Rapidfire, which sees the first card in the queue trigger twice, and Pharmacist to gain an extra pill slot. There are ten pills to discover in the Insider Trading demo, such as an anti-depressant that doubles tokens to a maximum of 25, and a Stimulant that, if used while the market is open, gives you a permanent plus one trigger to the first card in your queue.

If preventing the market you create from crushing you doesn’t sound challenging enough, you will also have to manage weekly events. These random events last the entire week and can range from the Picker’s Market event, which removes the effects of the first five cards in the queue, while the remaining five cards will get a plus one trigger count, to the Uncertainty event that adds three null cards to the deck at the start of the day. Although the Insider Trading roguelike capabilities have the potential to stack powerful synergies, there’s a lot you must adapt to to keep your run alive.

To beat the Insider Trading demo, you must make it through twenty days to secure a promotion. As long as you reach the target balance at the end of Friday, you will progress to the next week. Your balance will reset at the end of every week, and your next target will rise. 

Who is the developer of Insider Trading?

The Insider Trading developer goes by the name of Naiive. Even though Insider Trading will be the developer’s first published game, they’re showing promise by conducting playtests and deploying updates based on player feedback.

When will Insider Trading be released?

Insider Trading was originally supposed to release on Steam in 2025, but it has been delayed. The developer revealed this Insider Trading news via a Steam blog post on November 17, 2025, stating: 

“After receiving valuable feedback from the playtesters, I realized there’s still more I can improve on in Insider Trading. This means the full release will be delayed to Q1 2026.”

How long is the Insider Trading demo?

It takes approximately half an hour to reach the victory condition. Following the delay of the Insider Trading release date, the demo received a major update. The demo now has three playable characters, each with different playstyles and starting decks, as well as the introduction of a Hard difficulty mode. 

There are also now more than double the number of cards than were in the previous iteration of the demo, while plenty of cards have been updated. A Connections system has even been rolled out that allows you to customize the types of cards that spawn. Therefore, if you already completed the demo before the update, the number of changes justifies another playthrough.

References

1. Insider Trading – MAJOR DEMO UPDATE (Steam)