Lester’s five assassination missions are still the single biggest lump-sum money method in GTA 5 story mode, over a decade after launch. Done right, a few hundred thousand dollars turns into $1–2 billion, split across Michael, Franklin, and Trevor.
The order: Hotel → Multi Target → Vice → Bus → Construction. Do Hotel during the story (it’s forced). Save the other four until after The Big Score, so you’re investing tens of millions instead of a few thousand.
Quick answer: what to buy, when, and where
| # | Mission | Buy before | Buy after | Exchange | Typical peak return |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hotel Assassination | Betta Pharmaceuticals (BET) | Bilkington (BIL) | BAWSAQ → LCN | ~80% / ~80% |
| 2 | Multi Target Assassination | Debonaire (DEB) | Redwood (RWC) | LCN → LCN | ~80% / ~300% |
| 3 | Vice Assassination | Fruit (FRT) | Facade (FAC) | BAWSAQ → BAWSAQ | ~50% / ~30% |
| 4 | Bus Assassination | — (buy after only) | Vapid (VAP) | BAWSAQ | ~100% |
| 5 | Construction Assassination | GoldCoast (GCD) | — | LCN | ~80–90% |
Invest with all three protagonists every time — their money is separate. Sell in full before starting the next mission unless a step below tells you to hold.
Why the market moves at all
GTA 5 runs two separate exchanges, and they don’t work the same way, which is where most guides lose people.
LCN (Liberty City National Exchange) reacts to story events. Kill someone connected to a company, and its stock — or a named rival’s — moves on a script. This is the reliable half of the strategy, and it’s what almost every assassination payout depends on. LCN doesn’t trade on in-game weekends, so if your stock looks frozen, check the in-game day before you panic.
BAWSAQ is framed as “player-influenced” and is noisier — prices can drift for reasons that have nothing to do with your kill. The assassination missions still push it in a predictable direction, but the swings are less clean than LCN, and your percentage will vary more between playthroughs than the numbers in this guide.
Both markets are checked from your in-game phone or a laptop. To skip ahead to a price move without waiting in real time, go to a safehouse and sleep — this fast-forwards the clock, which is what actually drives both markets.
Before you touch a single stock
Complete Hotel Assassination as part of the story — it’s mandatory and can’t be skipped. Leave the other four alone until after The Big Score, the final heist. The Obvious approach pays out more per character (roughly $35–41 million depending on approach and split), and that’s the capital that turns these missions into nine-figure paydays instead of six-figure ones.
Three things that save you from losing a run:
Quick-save before every mission and before every investment. If a stock caps below where you expected, or a mission fails partway, you want a clean reload point rather than restarting the story.
Invest with all three characters separately each time. Michael, Franklin, and Trevor each hold their own bank balance and their own stock portfolio — skipping one of them on purpose or by accident cuts your total payout by roughly a third.
Don’t sell the moment the mission ends. The stock climb plays out over several in-game days, not instantly. Selling early is the single most common way players leave money on the table — sleep, check, repeat until the return percentage stalls or starts dropping, then sell everything at once.
The five missions, in order
1. Hotel Assassination — mandatory
Franklin kills Brett Lowrey, CEO of Bilkington Research. Before the mission, put every character’s cash into Betta Pharmaceuticals (BET) on BAWSAQ. After the mission, sleep and check until BET peaks — historically around 80% return, though some current-gen saves report the peak closer to 20–25% (more on why below). Sell everything, then roll the full balance into Bilkington (BIL) on LCN. Bilkington needs several more in-game days to bounce back, typically also landing near an 80% return. Sell before starting the next mission.
Do not chase the other four missions yet. Finish the main story and The Big Score first — the difference in payout is enormous, since you’re reinvesting $40M+ per character instead of whatever you’ve scraped together mid-story.
2. Multi Target Assassination
Four jurors threatening a lawsuit against Redwood Cigarettes get taken out. Before the mission, invest everything in Debonaire (DEB) on LCN. After the mission, sell DEB once it peaks (around 80%), then immediately put the full balance into Redwood (RWC), also on LCN. This is the highest single-stock payout in the entire chain — Redwood has historically returned 250–320% before it tops out, so give it the most patience of any stock in this guide. Sleep in multi-day jumps rather than checking every few hours.
By the end of this mission, three fully-invested characters are commonly sitting around $250–350 million combined, depending on your Big Score take and RNG on the peaks.
3. Vice Assassination
Franklin kills Jackson Skinner of Facade after finding him with a sex worker in La Puerta. Buy Fruit (FRT) on BAWSAQ before the mission. Sell after it peaks (around 50%), then buy Facade (FAC) — yes, the company Skinner worked for — on BAWSAQ. Facade’s rebound is smaller than the other stocks in this guide, typically 25–35%, so don’t expect it to carry the run the way Redwood or Vapid do. Sell it and move on.
4. Bus Assassination
This is the one mission where you buy nothing beforehand. Franklin poses as a bus driver to kill Isaac Penny, a major shareholder in Vapid Motor Company. There’s no pre-mission stock to buy because the kill itself crashes Vapid — you’re buying the dip, not riding a spike. After the mission, put everything into Vapid (VAP) on BAWSAQ and hold for several in-game days. The rebound is typically the single largest percentage gain of the five missions after Redwood, often reaching 100%.
5. Construction Assassination
Franklin kills Enzo Bonelli, a mob-connected real estate developer, at a heavily guarded construction site. Before the mission, buy GoldCoast (GCD) on LCN. After the mission, sell once it peaks. Reported peaks for this one vary more than any other stock in the guide — long-running community reports cite anywhere from 50% to 90%, and that split tracks with which build of the game (Legacy PS3/360, Xbox One/PS4, or the PS5/Series X Enhanced re-release) you’re on. Treat 80% as the realistic target rather than the ceiling.
With all five done and reinvested across three characters, most fully-invested runs land somewhere between $800 million and $2.1 billion combined — the exact number depends on your Big Score take, how patient you were on each peak, and which platform’s stock-percentage tuning you’re playing on.
The Bilkington move almost no guide walks through
There’s a second, more advanced pass at Hotel Assassination that stacks an extra ~$16 million per character on top of the standard run, and it hinges on timing Bilkington’s crash manually instead of waiting for it to happen on its own.
Play up to Hotel Assassination and complete your Betta Pharmaceuticals prep as usual, then finish Hotel Assassination and immediately start Blitz Play — the mission where Michael delivers a stolen part to Devin Weston. You need to be controlling Michael when he hands off the envelope; as soon as that happens, switch to Franklin (who’s already in the getaway car) and drive to Devin to finish the first recovery beat, then switch to Trevor to finish the second. Sell your Betta Pharmaceuticals stock at this point, but do not buy Bilkington yet.
Keep playing the story normally from there — Solomon Richards, the Trevor/Michael reunion, the hijacking mission, through to the Paleto Bay heist. Somewhere in that stretch, each character gets an unexpected $400,000, and Bilkington stock bottoms out. Buy Bilkington while it’s at its floor, and the eventual sell-off pays out roughly $16 million more per character than buying it at the normal post-mission price.
This only works on one specific playthrough sequence — if you’ve already sold Betta and bought Bilkington the standard way, you’ve missed the window for this run.
Extra cash before your first investment
If you want more than the base story money to put into Betta Pharmaceuticals before Hotel Assassination, a handful of side activities pay out fast and don’t cost story progress:
The Epsilon Program (Michael) pays $2.1 million if you walk away from the cult after finishing its errands. Maude’s Bail Bond missions (Trevor) pay a combined $40,000 for bringing targets in alive. The Drug Shootout and Altruist Cult Shootout random events (Trevor) drop briefcases worth $70,000 and $100,000. The Sonar Collections Dock property nets roughly $690,000 once you clear all the nuclear waste. None of these are required — The Big Score alone gives you more capital than all of them combined — but they’re useful if you want a bigger first swing at Betta Pharmaceuticals specifically.
How high can your balance actually go
GTA 5’s money value is stored as a 32-bit signed integer, which hard-caps every character’s balance at $2,147,483,647. You cannot exceed this number through stock trading or any other legitimate method — the game simply won’t credit anything past it.
One practical wrinkle: once a character is close to the cap, the “Sell All” button can fail to register the full sale properly. If that happens, sell shares manually — click into the individual stock, hit Sell, and hold the plus button up to the amount you want — rather than relying on the bulk-sell option.
Realistically, you don’t need anywhere near the cap. $500 million per character is enough to buy every property, vehicle, and weapon upgrade in the game with room to spare.
Why your numbers won’t match this guide
This is the part most guides skip, and it’s the reason review sections for every GTA 5 stock guide are full of people saying “this doesn’t work anymore.”
Platform and version differences are real. Community-reported peak percentages for the same stock differ between the original PS3/Xbox 360 release, the PS4/Xbox One “next-gen” version, and the PS5/Series X Enhanced edition. Rockstar has never published exact tuning values, so every number in this guide — and every other guide — is a community-observed average, not a guaranteed outcome. Treat the percentages as targets to sell near, not promises.
Reloading a save can shift the price you see. Players who quick-save at a stock’s apparent peak and reload later sometimes find the value has drifted lower than what they saved at — the game recalculates rather than freezing the exact number. Save slightly before what you think is the absolute top, not after.
LCN doesn’t move on weekends. If you’re staring at a flat Debonaire or Redwood price for what feels like too long, check the in-game calendar before assuming something’s broken.
Skipping a character halves your outcome, not just a third of it. Because the big payouts (Redwood, Vapid) compound off large starting balances, forgetting to invest with even one of the three protagonists costs far more than a proportional share — you lose that character’s compounding on every subsequent mission too.
FAQ
Do I have to do all five assassination missions?
No. Hotel Assassination is the only one required to progress the story. The other four — Multi Target, Vice, Bus, and Construction — are optional, but skipping them means skipping the majority of the total payout.
When’s the best time to do the optional four?
After The Big Score. Doing them earlier still works mechanically, but you’re investing whatever spare cash you’ve built up mid-story instead of $35–41 million per character, so the payout is a fraction of what it could be.
Does this work in GTA Online?
No. This entire system — Lester’s Assassinations, LCN, and this version of BAWSAQ — is exclusive to GTA 5 story mode. GTA Online has its own separate stock market tied to the Diamond Casino Heist and other Online-specific triggers, with different rules.
Which stock exchange should I trust more, LCN or BAWSAQ?
LCN, for this strategy specifically. It’s driven directly by story events and behaves consistently. BAWSAQ is framed as player-influenced and swings for reasons unrelated to your missions, so its percentages are less predictable — treat the ranges in this guide as a target zone, not a guarantee.
Why did my stock’s return percentage go down after I reloaded a save?
The game doesn’t always preserve the exact peak value across a reload — it can recalculate to a slightly lower point. Save a little before you think the stock has topped out, not right after, to avoid this.
What’s the actual maximum money I can have?
$2,147,483,647 per character, fixed by the game’s 32-bit integer limit. You won’t get a payout above this number no matter how much you reinvest.