Shares are one of the most important parts of the game. We have an opportunity to buy shares of other players, countries and even game. Every player has 10 000 shares of which 1000 can be sold to others. 1.000 shares are 10% of all the resources and gold a player produces; dividends are paid to every share holder depending on the amount of shares he has. Basically, having 200 shares will get us 2% of the production.
Countries’ shares work the same but there are 10 times more of them. We can trade 10.000 shares between players and 2.000 of them is 2% of resources that country gets. The next type of shares is game shares which are very interesting. Game has 1.000.000 of them and half of them - 500.000, can be traded. Share holders get dividends once game will get 100 gold in its budget. Gold in the budget appears for example when people do instant building for gold. Now we have a very important thing: share prices. When we see a share for 0.0001 gold because nobody bought them yet, don't get fooled. If we buy 1000 shares it won't be 0,1 gold for all of them because every next share is 0.0001 gold more expensive than the one before. For example, 1st share costs 0.0001 2nd one 0.0002 15th one 0.0015 and so on. We can count it very simply using one math formula for sum of sequence. If 1st share costs 0.0018 gold and we buy 100 shares, we would have to pay 0.685 gold for 100 of them.
Remember, if you would buy 100 shares before other people have bought 100 already, we have an increased chance to lose some gold cause people might sell their shares (once we bought they've got cheaper) and make them cheaper. This basically means that we will lose gold by this. In my opinion, if you would like to buy any shares, look for shares from new players and buy between 1 and 300 shares and you might get some gold by this because if you would buy 50 shares there is a big chance that people will buy some more and you could sell yours for a bigger amount of gold.