GTA 5 Stock Market Guide: How Lester's Assassination Missions Made You Rich

The real way GTA 5 players got rich in 2013 was not grinding heist paydays or hunting for a money glitch. It was five stock trades. Lester Crest's assassination missions let Franklin, Michael and Trevor buy low, trigger a hit, and cash out at a profit on GTA 5's two stock exchanges, turning a starting bank account into hundreds of millions, and with the right timing across all three characters, over $2 billion.

Essentials:

• GTA 5 has two markets: the offline LCN (Liberty City National Exchange) and the online BAWSAQ, which needs a game connection to update.
• Lester hands Franklin five assassination missions. Each one is tied to a company whose stock crashes or spikes once the target is dead.
• The pattern is almost always the same: invest before the mission, complete it, then sell for a profit that ranges from 50% to 300% depending on the stock and how long you wait.
• Investing with all three protagonists at once multiplies the payout, since each character has an independent portfolio.
• Do the story missions first. The richer you are going into the assassinations, the bigger the absolute profit.

What is the GTA 5 stock market?

GTA 5 runs two separate exchanges, and mixing them up is the most common mistake new players make.

The LCN (Liberty City National Exchange) works offline and updates based on in-game events, mostly missions and story triggers. It is available in single-player without an internet connection, which made it the exchange most players actually used back in 2013 on PS3 and Xbox 360.

BAWSAQ, on the other hand, simulates a live market shared across the community and only updates while the game is connected to Rockstar's servers. It reacts faster and can swing harder, but it is also the exchange most likely to show a "down for maintenance" message, especially years after launch. If you are playing the GTA 5 PS3 cheat codes era save file today, expect BAWSAQ to be unreliable.

Both markets let you invest cash from Franklin, Michael or Trevor's individual bank balance through any in-game computer or phone browser.

How Lester's assassination missions rig the market

The premise of Lester's five side jobs is simple: each target is an executive or public figure whose death tips a company's fortunes one way or the other. Lester tells you which company benefits and which one gets hurt, and the trick is investing in the winner before you pull the trigger.

This is not subtle in hindsight. It is Rockstar's satire of insider trading, dressed up as a side mission chain, and it remains one of the most efficient money makers ever built into a GTA campaign. Compare it with the payouts from the game's actual heists in the GTA 5 heists gold medal guide and the assassination missions still come out ahead per hour invested.

The five assassination missions and what to buy

Mission	Stock to buy	Exchange	When to invest	Typical profit
Hotel Assassination	Betta Pharmaceuticals	BAWSAQ	Before the mission	Around 80%
Multi-Target Assassination	Debonaire, then Redwood Cigarettes	LCN	Debonaire before, Redwood after	80%, then up to 300% over a week
Vice Assassination	iFruit	BAWSAQ	Before the mission	Around 50%
Bus Assassination	Vapid	BAWSAQ	After the mission, wait two days	Around 100%
Construction Assassination	Gold Coast Development	LCN	Before the mission	Around 80%

The Multi-Target Assassination is the outlier: you buy Debonaire first, sell it for a quick profit right after the mission, then roll all of that cash into Redwood Cigarettes and let it sit for several in-game days for the biggest single return of the five.

Rules that actually matter

A few habits separate players who cleared a few hundred thousand from the ones who ended the game with nine figures in the bank:

• Finish the story first. Investing $50,000 returns far less than investing $50 million. Players who saved the assassination missions for after the credits, once Franklin and Michael already had cash from the endgame heist, made exponentially more.
• Save before every trade. Stock swings are not instant and not guaranteed to peak exactly when a guide says they will. A dedicated save slot before investing lets you reload if the market undershoots.
• Spread the investment across all three characters. Franklin, Michael and Trevor each have separate bank accounts and separate stock portfolios, so the same $10 million invested three times effectively triples your exposure to the same guaranteed swing.
• Be patient with Redwood and Vapid. These two need real in-game time to peak, not an instant sell. Fast-forwarding by sleeping or waiting in a safehouse speeds this up without touching the clock on your console.

For players still chasing the game's other money-making systems, the GTA Online money glitches from 2013-2014 covered the multiplayer side of the same era, while the stock market plan above only ever touched story mode and was never patched out.

How much could you really make in 2013?

Players who executed all five missions correctly, split their capital across all three protagonists, and reinvested every payout reported final balances well past $2 billion combined. That number assumes near-perfect timing and starting the assassinations only after banking the story's biggest heist payout, which the GTA 5 100% completion checklist also treats as a late-game milestone since Lester's missions unlock progressively through the plot.

Realistically, most 2013 players who followed a guide walked away with $100 million to $500 million per character, which was still an absurd amount for a game that otherwise paid out five-figure mission rewards. It made the story mode's endgame - buying every property, every weapon, every car - a formality rather than a grind.

Story missions vs. the market: which made you richer

Regular story missions in 2013 paid modestly; even the flashiest heist setup jobs rewarded thousands, not millions. The stock market plan flipped that ratio entirely, turning a five-mission side chain into the single biggest income source in the entire single-player game, dwarfing anything from the actual jewel store job heist or later robbery missions.

That imbalance was intentional. Rockstar built the assassination missions as an optional, hidden system for players willing to read a guide or experiment, not a mandatory story beat, which is exactly why it became one of the most shared tips in GTA 5's first year online.

Common mistakes that wreck the payout

• Investing on the wrong exchange. Betta Pharmaceuticals, iFruit and Vapid live on BAWSAQ; Debonaire, Redwood and Gold Coast Development live on LCN. Checking the wrong market shows nothing and wastes the setup.
• Selling too early. Redwood and Vapid both need days, not minutes, to reach their peak. Selling right after the mission locks in a fraction of the real profit.
• Investing before finishing the story. The dollar amount matters more than the percentage. 80% profit on $5,000 is nothing next to 80% profit on $50 million.
• Forgetting to reload a bad save. If the market dips instead of spikes, that is usually a sign the timing was off, not that the method failed. Reload and try again rather than selling at a loss.

Does the stock market still work today?

The LCN still works exactly as it did in 2013, since it is a purely offline, scripted system tied to game events. BAWSAQ is far less reliable now: it depends on a live connection to Rockstar's simulated market, and on older-generation consoles it frequently shows as down for maintenance. If you are replaying GTA 5's story mode today, LCN-based plays, the Multi-Target and Construction assassinations, are the safer bet for guaranteed profit.