When starting up a new company, you need cash. In the case of railroad tycoon 2 you need cash to set up stations, build track and buy trains before you can start to make money. So how do you get the initial cash? Well usually you might have some money personally which you can put in. In the case of railroad tycoon 2 you have $100,000 of personal cash to put into your company, however this is not enough to set up a working rail company.

There are two ways of raising money. Either you can borrow it which means paying it back later with interest, or you can get other people (called investors) to put money in your company and get a share in the company, which means they receive some of the companies profits in small payments called dividends. If the investors think that they are not being paid very much then they might sell their shares and invest in the competition.

If a lot of selling goes on the share price goes down because if there are more sellers than buyers, the price must fall to attract more buyers. Similarly if a lot of buying goes on then the share price goes up. If your player has a lot of money invested in shares and the price goes down, then your loosing wealth. Similarly if the price goes up your wealth goes up.

In general people will want to buy shares in successful companies with reasonable dividend payments. Although high dividends pay lots of money to the investors, a low dividend can be equally desirable as it allows the company to retain a large amount of its profits which can be used for growth - setting up more operations and making more profits from them.

Don't forget that although the chairman will run the company, the company is owned by the shareholders. If the chairman does a very bad job then its possible the shareholders will vote to overthrow the him/her. However, the number of votes each shareholder gets is proportional to the number of shares they have in the company. If the chairman owns over 50% of the company, he/she can never be overthrown.