Since Kokoro mentioned me--
yes, it's true that Kismet and I played the Survivor Market game really hard in S2, as did landruajm and technoir. That game was quite elaborate, created and run by an outside company that went belly up the week of the Amber boot, so we all got burned on our long term investments.Since I presume you're not programming the game to be run by clicking to buy and sell, I'm not sure how much that game set-up will help you, but I will tell you how it worked and you can see what you want to adapt.
Some features of that game:
The stock was paid off if it was the correct answer to a question. There were lots of questions:
Some examples:
Who will be the sole Survivor?
Who will be the last Ogakor? Kucha?
There were weekly questions for who would win IC/RC/ and who would get booted. If there was any doubt there would be a clear winner then None of the Above was an option, because there had to be ONE answer that would pay off.
We could create questions; I did several. You could have Yes/No questions where there were only 2 answers, or up to 16 possible answers, but a complete answer set always cost the same amount of money (see below).
Ex of custom questions:
How many women will be in the Final 4?
Will any Survivor get a family visit?
Combination of names who make final 4.
Final 2 combinations.
For these questions with combinations it was important to include None of the Above as an option.
The questions came onto the market as complete sets of all possible answers. Players who opted to become "Market Makers" could buy a set. The correct answer was worth $100 and it cost $100 to buy a set, so if you did nothing with it you broke even.
The idea was to keep the answer you thought was correct and dump the others. Some answers were hot and some were not. You had to adjust your asking price for the hot items to compensate for unsalable stock.
If there were 5 answers and you could manage to sell most of them plus you managed to keep the correct answer you kept you would easily double or treble your money.
I managed to get to #1 for a fleeting moment primarily as a Market Maker.
Because every share of stock that got created was issued as a complete set of the answers (ex: Survivors)--large stockpiles of less popular Survivors accrued.
I had an immense stockpile of Tina stock. No one wanted to buy it, whereas Amber stock was very hot due to the Lis/Amber final 2 hoax theory. Colby would go up and down.
There were a lot of players going on emotions. Stock that Jerri would get booted was very hot every week, lol.
Trading: there were two listings:
Stock offers (for sale) and stock bids (to buy).
Stock available to be bought for each question was listed with the price and who was offering it. The game was all electronic so the trading was fast and furious. You could drop your stock to underbid another player at any time. Obviously, everyone bought the stock for a question that was the lowest in price, so if no one was taking you had to drop your price until there was some buyer who would take it off your hands.
Ex: By dropping Jerri as sole survivor down to $.25, someone was willing to buy it and since I had thousands of them from buying sets, something was better than nothing.
The bids were also listed by trader, item, and the price they were willing to pay. It was dangerous to leave your orders standing when an episode was running (or this season, when Snewser or PT's pick is about to come out).
Basically, anyone who had a standing order was open to get sold bum stock once the real answer aired.
After each episode aired--the correct answers for that episode paid off and went back into your trading account. The long term answers weren't paying off until later or the end of the game.
The balance between short term and long term stock was one of the important parts of strategy, because if you tied up all your money in long term stock you had no money coming in for right answers and would tend to run out of funds for acquiring new stock for the weekly questions.
As I said, the game stopped in Ep 11, so no one could be said to have won, because they never paid off on the sole survivor stock or the last of each tribe.
btw, I think we started with $100,000 or some large amount. We were not given any stock to start. I believe that SurvivorBlows acted as the first Market Maker to create sets and put out the initial stock offerings until players caught on to the Market Maker strategy.
I think upping the amount of fantasy money that players get (and the cost of stock) is a good idea. Since it's not real money, might as well inflate the figures so players can try to make a million dollars; it adds to the cyber-thrill.
Ah, memories of when I was a contender! 
"as for the truth, it seems we just pick a theory"--Indigo Girls, Deconstruction
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