Trading School

The vocabulary you need before your first round — explained the way you'll actually use it in the game.

Bid, Offer & Spread

Every price in this game (and every real financial market) is quoted two-way:

Bid — the price the quoter will buy at. If you sell to them, you get the bid.
Offer / Ask — the price the quoter will sell at. If you buy from them, you pay the offer.
Spread — the gap between bid and offer (offer − bid). It's the market maker's cushion: quote too tight and one bad trade wipes you out; quote too wide and nobody trades with you.

Gold (XAUUSD) is quoted around $4,025 with a spread of about $0.30–$0.50. A quote of 4024.70 / 4025.10 means you can sell at 4024.70 or buy at 4025.10. Euro/dollar is quoted to five decimals, often about a pip wide, such as 1.12200 / 1.12212. Dollar/yen is quoted to three decimals, where a pip is 0.01.

Swap (overnight rollover)

Hold a leveraged position past a broker's daily rollover cutoff and you pay or receive swap — essentially the interest-rate cost of financing that position overnight. Long positions and short positions are charged (or credited) different rates.

In this game, every trade you hold open when the round's "rollover" ticks over gets charged swap automatically, just like a real CFD/FX position. Sit on a big position for a long round and swap can quietly eat your edge — part of learning to manage inventory, not just call direction correctly.

Pips, points & tick size

A tick (or point) is the smallest price increment an instrument moves in. For gold that's $0.01. On EURUSD, GBPUSD and EURGBP a pip is the 4th decimal (0.0001), and the price is shown to a fifth decimal. On USDJPY a pip is 0.01. The scoreboard counts gold in dollars per ounce and the currency pairs in pips, so the two are a similar size of result. You still need the move to clear the spread before it pays.

Long vs Short

Long means you bought, betting the price rises. Short means you sold (even something you didn't own first) betting the price falls. Your net position is the sum of your buys minus your sells — a market maker tries to keep this near zero (flat) so they're not exposed to which way the market moves.

Leverage & margin

Leverage lets you control a position bigger than your account balance, using margin as a deposit. It multiplies both gains and losses. This game doesn't require margin to keep the mechanics simple, but every P&L swing you see is what a leveraged real position would feel like — small price moves, big score swings.

Market making vs. directional trading

A directional trader bets the price goes up or down. A market maker instead quotes two-way prices to everyone and tries to profit from the spread while managing the inventory that trading with people leaves them. Gary Stevenson's edge in the book came from combining both: reading the flow of who's buying and selling to estimate fair value better than anyone else at the table, then trading (or quoting) accordingly.

💡 In-game tactic: when you're asked for a price, don't just quote your best guess — shade your quote away from your own position. If you're already long, make your offer more attractive (lower) to encourage people to buy from you and flatten you out.

Reading the reveals

Each round drips out public information (like the book's face-down centre cards being turned over). Combine that with your own private signal to keep re-estimating fair value — the players who update fastest and quote with discipline around that number tend to win.

Ready — start a round