Learn · Reading the tape
News and fair value
How fictional events enter the simulation without directly rewriting traded prices.
Last updated: 2026-09-20
The headlines belong to this city
MockTradeCity's news describes its own fictional economy. A company update can concern orders, production or customer renewals. An earnings release summarizes a company's simulated operating results. Sector stories concern a group of related businesses, while macro events can affect several sectors differently. None is reporting on a real listed company. A familiar business term such as revenue still refers to the city's invented business and its simulated circumstances.
The engine schedules company and sector news through a regular news cycle, with earnings entering when their reporting schedule calls for them. Macro events use a separate, slower cadence. The purpose is a continuing public record of events that participants can respond to, not a promise that each headline creates an immediate price move. The publication time establishes when a story became available; it does not identify the first trade caused by that story.
An event is not an execution
Publishing news records an event with a direction, strength and active period. It does not execute an order, transfer City Coin or overwrite the latest traded price. An event can influence the valuation process and the decisions of virtual participants. Those participants still need to submit orders into the same matching system used by players. Price discovery then depends on eligible counterparties, quantities and prices actually meeting in the book.
Consider a fictional report that changes expected demand for Pear Technologies. The engine can adjust the simulation's valuation pressure, and some institutions may alter their orders. Existing sellers may meet them, withdraw or remain at other prices. Until an execution occurs, the last-trade price remains the last trade. A headline and a nearby price move can be related, but timing alone does not prove that every execution after publication had that single cause.
Fair value is an internal reference
The engine maintains an internal fair-value signal for each company. It combines citywide, sector and company components with ongoing trend and variation, scaled by session activity. The signal is an input to simulated behavior, not a public analyst target or a displayed price that players can trade against directly. The company page shows executions and public news; it does not expose an authoritative number that the market is required to reach.
Active events add their influence through this process. Company, sector and macro effects can overlap, while the model's bounds limit how the internal signal develops around its reference. Different participants use different strategies, inventory constraints and budgets when turning information into orders. They are not all clones placing an identical instruction at publication. A private calculation inside the simulation should therefore not be confused with a second, earlier version of the public headline.
Influence fades rather than switching the quote
For ordinary events, the model distributes influence more heavily near the beginning and reduces it over the active period. This is a schedule for the internal input, not a prescribed shape for the public chart. Crisis-scale macro events can use a different decay curve. The resulting trades still depend on participants acting, having resources and finding counterparties. A fading input does not mechanically require a price to return to its starting point.
Several events may be active simultaneously. One company can have an earnings update while its sector faces another event and the whole city responds to a macro change. A trade also reflects the orders already waiting and the positions participants need to manage. This makes a single-headline explanation incomplete in many cases. The public price is the result of matching through all those conditions, rather than a direct display of one event's numerical strength.
Where to follow news in the city
The company news panel collects that company's updates and relevant sector or market events. The Market page's city feed emphasizes broader stories, and Daily Wrap places a completed day's news beside its recorded market statistics. A company profile offers another route to recent developments and business background. The title, event type and timestamp establish what was published and when; they do not tell you that a particular trade or position was justified.
A short-interval chart and the trade list let you compare publication times with subsequent activity. The Order book adds current depth, which the headline cannot show. If no trade occurs, the latest price may stay unchanged while internal valuations and waiting orders change. These are observable parts of a fictional market operating in City Coin. Reading them together explains the mechanism without treating a news label as a forecast or assuming that an unobservable fair value guarantees convergence.