Decided to avoid waiting for a group to play it and went for a few test games with my wife. With only 2 people in the market, and thus only one other person who can sabotage a position that you hold, we seemed to have markets where the fate of a particular stock was fairly well defined and upwards in trend. There would be a the occasional dip, but in general, everything went mostly upwards.

With this general dynamic in place, the strategy seemed small. Mostly, it was a "who rolls a color/region combination in the early turns which allows the formation of a cluster" type of game. Whoever was fortunate enough to do this, got 3 or 4000 turtles and could buy 3 or 4 shares of initial offerings. Since that person was placing 50% of the tokens on the market board, they could usually protect their clusters from attack and carry the intial momentum into an exponentially growing lead.

Kind of parallel to the effect people remark in games of settlers.

Multi-player games are still just a thought experiemtn for me. Anyone care to comment on how much of this runaway leader effect there is in 3-4-5 player games? Is there any at all? what are the common developments amongst multiple players?

With two players, one color always stepped out in a lead turning into the "sure thing" stock. Whoever got the largest early investment into this market usually won by a large margin.