GTA 5 Stock Market: Make Billions With Lester

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 runs two stock exchanges, lcn-exchange.com and bawsaq.com, both reachable from your phone’s browser or an in-game computer. The first, the LCN (Liberty City National Exchange), only reacts to in-game events, never to other players. NPCs and radio newscasts drop tips about its stocks. 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. Its prices move with the combined behavior of the player base, and back in the day you could follow it on Rockstar’s Social Network. It’s still unclear exactly what drives it. The core mechanic is the same on both: buy low, sell high, using the fallout of a mission to guess which stock is about to spike.

Lester’s Assassinations, the Money Machine

Lester sends Franklin 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. Every contract shows up as a green L on the map.

The first mission, The Hotel Assassination, targets Brett Lowrey, the CEO of Bilkington Research: his death sinks Bilkington 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. Want a bigger stake for that first bet? Michael’s Epsilon Program pays $2.1 million if you betray the cult, and buying the Sonar Collections Dock nets about $690,000 once all the nuclear waste is hauled up.

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.

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.

One more condition: pick Ending C (Deathwish). Devin Weston’s ultimatum comes right after the Big Score, and Franklin’s phone then offers three choices. Ending A kills Trevor, Ending B kills Michael, and either way that protagonist and his money are gone from your save, a third of your capital with them. Our guide to GTA 5’s three endings has the full breakdown.

The Five-Assassination Cheat Sheet

Here’s the play for each mission, in order, with the return to aim for. The running total assumes you start the series after the Big Score, with the cash from the final heist.

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.

Stock Plays During the Story

Lester’s contracts aren’t the only rigged prices. A handful of story missions and random events move a ticker too, and they pad your bank accounts before the optional assassinations. The last two only work if you play Ending C.

The Bilkington line is a community refinement reported by GTA BOOM: do the Hotel Assassination before Blitz Play, hold off on Bilkington until the Paleto Score, and each character gets an extra $400,000 to invest, worth about $16 million more by the end of the run. On the flip side, never touch LifeInvader, Richards Majestic or Merryweather: all three only go down during the campaign.

BAWSAQ Down? The LCN Still Rules

Here’s the most common trap: half the plays above (Betta, Fruit, Facade, Vapid) run through the BAWSAQ, the player-driven market, so treat those percentages as targets rather than promises. The Social Club website, where its prices used to be tracked, also went dark in mid-July 2025 with no official announcement. Don’t let that market 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 market only answers to in-game events, so it 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. Will it come back in GTA 6? Rockstar hasn’t said a word about it so far.