Learn · Who's in the city
Virtual investors and market makers
The participants behind the city's orders have different strategies, finite resources and shared execution rules.
Last updated: 2026-09-20
A market populated by different participants
A newly opened fictional market would have little activity if every order had to wait for another human player. MockTradeCity includes virtual retail investors, institutions and market makers that operate alongside players. Their orders enter the same matching system and settle in City Coin (CC) and fictional shares. They are participants with accounts and constraints, rather than a separate mechanism that draws a price chart regardless of whether anyone actually traded.
Every participant needs resources for its commitments. A virtual institution cannot purchase an unlimited quantity merely because its strategy wants a larger position. Inventory, cash, borrowing and risk limits constrain what it can do. A depleted or constrained desk may reduce activity. This makes the city's response depend on its participants' current state, rather than assuming there is always an invisible buyer or seller large enough to absorb any player order.
Retail strategies add different rhythms
Virtual retail accounts vary in resources and timing. Their activity changes across the city's sessions, contributing to differences between a busy Regular period and quieter Overnight trading. Some strategies respond to recent movement, while recurring-purchase participants follow a scheduled budget. These rules produce different reasons to submit an order. They do not give each account a guarantee of profit or exemption from the normal reservation and settlement requirements.
A recurring purchase still needs CC and eligible liquidity; a participant following movement can encounter a reversal or an unfilled order. The public tape records only completed executions, not every unrealized intention of these strategies. Seeing several trades near one another therefore does not by itself identify one virtual account as the cause. The Order book and trade list describe the combined activity of many participants acting under their own constraints.
Institutions have different mandates
Institutional styles include valuation-oriented portfolios, growth and trend strategies, pension-style allocation, quantitative trading, event-driven activity and index rebalancing. Public mandates describe the role and risk scope of each institution. Some desks concentrate on sector allocation, some accumulate positions gradually and others maintain multiple resting levels around a reference. These differences help explain why institutions can react differently to the same published event or the same sequence of market trades.
Short-focused and long-short desks must still borrow shares, provide collateral and cover obligations under the usual rules. Larger institutions may operate separately funded trading desks, each with its own orders, while ownership disclosure can aggregate the beneficial institution's holdings. Multiple desks are not a privilege to bypass matching or create unlimited inventory. Their public descriptions provide context, but do not expose every live order or every internal valuation used in the simulation.
Market makers quote within constraints
Market makers post both bids and asks, adjusting quotes for inventory and risk. Different desks can provide depth at different distances from a reference, so the book need not depend on one identical quoting instruction. Their posted prices are still orders waiting for execution. The latest traded price changes only when eligible orders match; moving a market-maker quote alone does not manufacture a trade or replace the last printed price.
Finite capital and inventory mean that liquidity can become thinner under pressure. Market makers have no automatic right to fill before an earlier order at the same price, and they face applicable halts and price protections. Public news is available to players when it is published, rather than being privately released to institutions first. The engine also uses internal simulation signals, so equal access to public headlines does not mean every participant has identical calculations.
Where to find participants in the city
A company's ownership panel links disclosed institutional holders to their public profiles. Those profiles describe mandates, holding horizons, risk bands and disclosed positions. The disclosure is deliberately delayed and threshold-based, so it cannot function as a complete live view of every desk's holdings. It supplies context about meaningful ownership under the city's disclosure rules. An institution absent from the panel may still trade below the applicable public threshold.
The company Order book and trade list show the shared market these participants create, while Daily Wrap describes aggregate outcomes. Market rules explains the common execution and risk restrictions, and About explains why city prices arise inside the simulation. None of these views proves a particular participant's intent from a price move alone. Taken together, they show a fictional market with observable rules and bounded participants, whose interactions can be studied without involving real funds.