Learn · Reading the tape
Volume and turnover
One counts shares, the other counts CC, and neither tells you which way a price must move.
Last updated: 2026-09-20
Count a completed trade once
Volume is the number of shares exchanged in completed trades over a defined period. A 200-share execution adds 200 shares to volume, not 400. There is a buyer and a seller, but they are the two sides of the same exchange. An order waiting in the book adds nothing until it executes. A canceled unfilled order also adds nothing, however large its requested quantity looked before cancellation.
In MockTradeCity, those executions come from the shared matching system used by players, virtual investors and market makers. Volume is not an independently generated decoration for a chart. The main company summary reports Regular-session activity, while chart session controls can expose other periods. A count from Overnight and a count from Regular describe different sets of trades, so a meaningful comparison begins by identifying the period each number covers.
Turnover attaches a price to every share
Turnover is the sum of price times quantity for every execution in the period. Its unit is City Coin (CC). If 100 shares trade at 20 CC and another 100 at 21 CC, volume is 200 shares and turnover is 4,100 CC. Multiplying all 200 shares by the final price would produce 4,200 CC, which is not the actual turnover because the earlier shares traded at a different price.
This distinction also matters across companies. Trading 10,000 shares at 300 CC produces 3,000,000 CC of turnover; the same quantity at 8 CC produces 80,000 CC. The share counts match, but the amounts exchanged do not. Turnover makes that price-level difference visible. It does not measure money created, profit earned or net CC entering the whole market: every completed trade transfers consideration between its two counterparties.
Company size changes the comparison
A share count needs context when companies have different floats. Volume of 500,000 shares is half a percent of a 100-million-share float, but ten percent of a five-million-share float. Share turnover rate divides volume by float to express that relationship. The city's quote summary uses Regular-session volume for this ratio. It measures trading relative to circulating shares, not the proportion of distinct owners who have decided to participate.
The same share can trade repeatedly during a day. As a result, neither volume nor share turnover rate identifies how many unique shares or people were involved. Comparing a company with its own earlier sessions is another way to describe activity, provided the periods are comparable. A partial morning and an entire completed day are unequal observation windows even if a table places their raw numbers close together on the screen.
More activity is not a direction
Higher volume means more shares traded than in the comparison period; lower volume means fewer. Those descriptions do not, by themselves, say whether the price rose or fell. A day with heavy trading can finish above, below or near previous close. The trade list adds information about individual executions, including their active side, while the aggregate total deliberately compresses that sequence into a single quantity for the chosen period.
Book depth is separate again. High volume describes what already executed; depth describes what is waiting now. A stock can have substantial completed activity and a thin current book after orders are filled or canceled. Conversely, a deep book can exist while little trades. Comparing a price jump with its corresponding volume helps describe the amount exchanged around the move, but it cannot establish every participant's motive or determine what comes next.
Where to compare activity in the city
The company summary displays volume, turnover and share turnover rate with their relevant units. The chart's VOL panel groups volume into the same intervals as the selected price view. A one-minute column and a daily column are therefore different aggregations. The trade list supplies the individual quantities behind the totals. Together these views distinguish a larger number of traded shares from a higher amount of CC exchanged at a higher price.
On the Market page, sorting by volume or turnover ranks companies according to the selected measure. Daily Wrap includes the leading turnover names and the city's aggregate activity for the completed day. Dividing one company's turnover by the city total describes concentration in that company, rather than its price direction. Checking units and periods first keeps these comparisons consistent, whether the English interface abbreviates the amount with K, M or B or displays the full figure.