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How a price is set and how an order gets filled.
11 entries
1770s–1920s
Thinkers explain prices, trade and competition, while the telegraph and the ticker speed markets up.
The stock ticker, introduced in 1867, sent prices by telegraph and printed them on paper tape in brokers' offices. Company names were shortened to a few letters to save time: ticker symbols.
💡 Why it made sense then
Prices used to travel by runner. The telegraph let traders far from the exchange see prices within minutes.
Ideas it gave us
A ticker symbol is the short code of letters used to identify a stock on an exchange, like AAPL for Apple or TSLA for Tesla.
🎮 Every listed person has a ticker too, 2 to 5 capital letters, unique across the game, like $HSN for Hasan Piker.
Open the full entry →A real-time quote is a stock's current price as trades happen, as opposed to a delayed quote that lags by 15 to 20 minutes.
🎮 Prices, moves and market caps in the game update live as players trade.
Open the full entry →From the 1870s, New York Stock Exchange specialists stood at one post and handled one stock. They kept a book of customers' orders to buy or sell at set prices, including orders to sell if the price fell to a level, and filled orders to buy or sell at once from it.
They were expected to trade themselves to keep the market orderly when buyers or sellers were scarce.
💡 Why it made sense then
As trading grew, someone had to match orders that arrived at different times and keep a price available.
Ideas it gave us
An order book is the live list of buy and sell orders waiting at each price for a stock.
🎮 The game has no order book. Each listing's curve plays its part, and the quote on every profile shows how much you could buy or sell near the current price (the depth).
Open the full entry →A limit order buys or sells only at a set price or better, so you control the price but it may never fill.
🎮 Price-point orders let you invest on a dip or take profit when a person hits a price you choose.
Open the full entry →A market order buys or sells straight away at the best price available, trading certainty of filling for certainty of price.
🎮 Every buy or sell you place on a profile is a market order: it fills at once along the curve. Share orders are protected, so the fill can't be more than 2% worse than the price you saw.
Open the full entry →A stop-loss order sells automatically once a stock falls to a set price, to cap how much you can lose.
🎮 Set a price-point order to sell if a person drops to your stop price.
Open the full entry →Liquidity is how easily something can be bought or sold quickly without moving its price much.
🎮 Every listing is liquid in the sense that the curve always trades, but a quiet listing moves more per dollar. Market cap and depth on the quote tell you how much a trade will shift the price.
Open the full entry →In his 1900 thesis, The Theory of Speculation, French mathematician Louis Bachelier modelled price changes as random and used it to value options on the Paris Bourse. His work was largely ignored for half a century.
💡 Why it made sense then
Paris had an active options market, and Bachelier wanted a scientific way to price its contracts.
Ideas it gave us
Volatility measures how much and how quickly a price moves up and down, usually as the annualized standard deviation of its returns.
🎮 Each person's option prices use their own measured volatility.
Open the full entry →1929–1950s
The Great Depression leads to deposit insurance, securities law, margin rules and modern economic statistics.
In The General Theory (1936), Keynes argued that economies can get stuck with high unemployment and that government spending can lift demand. He also explained why people prefer to hold cash in uncertain times.
💡 Why it made sense then
Years of depression had shaken the belief that markets always recover quickly on their own.
Ideas it gave us
Fiscal policy is the government's use of spending and taxes to influence the economy. Spending more or taxing less stimulates growth; the reverse cools it.
🎮 Game taxes go to a public treasury that pays for bank bailouts before any new money is printed.
Open the full entry →Liquidity is how easily something can be bought or sold quickly without moving its price much.
🎮 Every listing is liquid in the sense that the curve always trades, but a quiet listing moves more per dollar. Market cap and depth on the quote tell you how much a trade will shift the price.
Open the full entry →1950s–1990s
Risk gets measured, options get a formula, and index funds and ETFs bring the whole market to everyone.
Nasdaq began on 8 February 1971 as an electronic system showing the prices at which competing dealers would buy and sell each stock.
💡 Why it made sense then
Finding the best price used to mean phoning several dealers; a screen showed them all at once.
Ideas it gave us
The bid is the highest price a buyer will pay right now, the ask is the lowest price a seller will accept, and the spread is the gap between them.
🎮 Every profile shows a broker-style quote with the bid, ask, spread and depth.
Open the full entry →A real-time quote is a stock's current price as trades happen, as opposed to a delayed quote that lags by 15 to 20 minutes.
🎮 Prices, moves and market caps in the game update live as players trade.
Open the full entry →2000–today
Trading moves online, costs fall to zero, and crises bring bailouts, quantitative easing and new rules.
US stock prices had been quoted in fractions of a dollar, with the gap between buy and sell prices often 1/16 of a dollar. In 2001 exchanges switched to cents, and spreads narrowed.
💡 Why it made sense then
Fractions were a leftover from old trading customs, and cents made trading cheaper for investors.
Ideas it gave us
The bid is the highest price a buyer will pay right now, the ask is the lowest price a seller will accept, and the spread is the gap between them.
🎮 Every profile shows a broker-style quote with the bid, ask, spread and depth.
Open the full entry →Slippage is the difference between the price you expected and the price you actually got on a trade.
🎮 Big buys move a listing's bonding curve, so the average price you pay is above the quote you saw.
Open the full entry →Around 2017, developers described bonding curves, formulas that set a token's price from how many are in circulation. In November 2018 Uniswap launched an exchange that priced trades with a constant-product formula, with no order book.
💡 Why it made sense then
Without a company matching buyers and sellers, a formula could always quote a price.
Ideas it gave us
An automated market maker is a pricing formula that always quotes a price to buy or sell, instead of matching buyers with sellers in an order book.
🎮 Every listing is priced by an automated market maker: a curve fixed when the listing opens (exponential, power or constant product) always quotes a price, so you never wait for someone on the other side.
Open the full entry →A bonding curve is a formula that sets an asset's price from how many units are in circulation, so each purchase raises the price and each sale lowers it.
🎮 Every listing's public pool is priced by a bonding curve, so even a brand-new listing always has a quote.
Open the full entry →🎮 Practise with $10,000 in play money
Try it in a live 3D city with play money: trade shares in real public figures, get margin-called, pay your taxes and rob a bot or two. Free, and nothing real is at stake.
For learning only. This isn't financial advice.
