How the price works
Every person on the board has two numbers. The Momentum Score is the data’s number. The market price is the number you trade at. This page says how each one moves, in plain language, and publishes the arithmetic and the limits behind the second.
The score comes from outside signals only
The Momentum Score moves on three forces: Gravity, the pull towards a person’s baseline; Signals, the news and data about them; and Market Mood, the tide across everyone we track. All three read the world outside this platform: news, uploads, streams, games and filings. Nothing anyone does here moves it. Buying, selling and holding do not touch the score, by construction, and a test fails the build if they ever could.
Two more readings sit beside those three on every profile, Trading Activity and Conviction. They describe the market, not the person, and they add exactly nothing to the score. Trading Activity is the buying and selling that moves the market price. Conviction is the capital held open on a person: more of it tightens that person’s spread, and never widens it.
The market price moves with trading, and drifts back
The market price is the score plus a premium. Every share bought pushes the premium up a little; every share sold pushes it down. With no trading at all, the premium halves every 4 hours for a public figure and every 2 hours for a private individual, one small step at every 30-second tick, until the market price is the score again. A profile reads “+4.0 above the data” when the premium is four points, and “in line with the data” when it is gone.
That drift back happens whether or not anyone is still holding. If many people bought while the premium was high and then sell after it has drifted back toward zero, their selling pushes the market price below the score for a while. A wave of exits can take the market price under the data. The score is unchanged by any of it, and the premium drifts back up toward zero from there at the same pace.
The quotes, and what a round trip costs
You buy at the Buy quote and sell at the Sell quote. The two sit either side of the market price by the spread, and the gap between them is the platform’s spread, shown on every trade sheet. A round trip against an otherwise unchanged market costs the spread, plus at most a cent of rounding (the spread on a fraction of a share is counted up to the whole cent): the move your own buying put on the price is undone when you sell the same shares back. The market is never quite unchanged in practice, because the minimum hold keeps you in for a while and the premium your buying added drifts back toward the score as you wait.
Each quote is the price before your order. An order moves along the price as it fills, so it pays an average a little past the quote and its last share a little past that. Both figures are shown before you confirm, the average is the price you confirm, and the server refuses the order rather than filling it if that average has moved by more than $0.10 a share by the time it reads it.
Show the arithmeticHide the arithmetic
The arithmetic
Quantities are counted in thousandths of a share, prices in whole cents, and every step is integer arithmetic. With S the quote in cents (the score plus or minus half the spread, premium excluded), I the market’s inventory in thousandths (positive after net buying, negative after net selling) and D the depth (the tier’s, unless the person carries their own):
- a buy of u costs
- ceil( u·S / 1000 + u·(2I + u) / (20·D) ) cents
- a sell of u brings
- floor( u·S / 1000 + u·(2I − u) / (20·D) ) cents
- the premium
- trunc( I × 100 / D ) cents a share
- the market price
- score + premium / 100
- decay, each tick
- I − sign(I) · ceil( |I| / K ), K = round( half-life in ticks / ln 2 )
A buy rounds up to the cent and a sell rounds down, so a fraction of a cent is never settled in the buyer’s or the seller’s favour. A depth of 300 shares means that many shares of net buying move the market price one point.
A round trip of u against an unchanged market costs ceil( u·Δ / 1000 ) cents or one cent more, with Δ the gap between the Buy and Sell quotes in cents: the two walks cancel, and only the buy’s rounding up and the sell’s rounding down are left.
The platform is the other side of every trade
There is no order book of other traders. When you buy, the platform sells to you; when you sell, the platform buys from you. The platform keeps the spread and holds the other side of every price move, and it records its own side of every close and every decay step in a house book, to the cent, so the platform’s position is always a number on the record and never an estimate.
The limits
Every person is either a public figure or a private individual, and each tier has its own limits. These are the settings as they stand right now; a change to them changes this page without a deploy.
| Setting | Public figure | Private individual |
|---|---|---|
| Depth (shares of net buying per point) | 300 shares | 100 shares |
| Premium half-life with no trading | 4 hours | 2 hours |
| Most the market price may sit from the score | 8.0 points | 3.0 points |
| Largest single order | 60 shares | 10 shares |
| Minimum hold before a position can be closed | 10 minutes | 24 hours |
| Most the platform will hold on one person, net | 3,000 shares | 400 shares |
| Circuit breaker on the premium | 3.0 points in 10 minutes halts trading for 30 minutes | 1.5 points in 10 minutes halts trading for 1 hour |
| Circuit breaker on the whole price | none | 5.0 points in 10 minutes halts trading for 1 hour |
| Selling short | not allowed | not allowed |
Individual people can carry their own settings; where they do, their profile says so.
The smallest order is $1.00, either way of entering it. A person can also be halted (a breaker tripped or an operator stepped in; every order is refused until a stated time), paused (nothing can be placed), or display-only (the score is shown, nothing new can be opened, and anything already held can still be closed). Each state is written on the profile and on the trade sheet when it applies.
A halt pauses all trading in that person, including closing a position you already hold, until the halt ends.
Everything is on the record
Every change of the premium, whether a trade, a decay step or a reset, is recorded with the score at that instant. With the score history and the orders, every market price ever quoted can be reproduced from the record, and a test does exactly that.
All of this is paper trading with paper credits. No real money changes hands anywhere on the platform.