Market

The market trades raw resources and military units through sell offers and a shared order book. Buy and sell orders match automatically when their prices cross.

Selling

Create an offer for a resource at a chosen price per unit.
You can have one active offer per resource at a time.
When you list, the resources are held in escrow (removed from your storage immediately) so they can’t be double-sold.
Cancelling an offer returns the escrowed resources to you. (A company offer returns them to the company warehouse instead: see below.)

Tradeable items: coal, iron, water, oil, diamond, uranium, lithium, and the four military units (infantry, tank, missile, jet). Corn, Levcoins, and Emeralds are not tradeable on the market.

Buying

Offers are listed cheapest first: and the list includes resting asks from the order book alongside the fixed-price listings, so the cheapest goods in the game are never hidden behind a tab. A book row is marked; buying works the same either way.
You can buy a partial quantity: the offer shrinks and disappears when it hits zero.
You cannot buy your own offer.

The order book

Every sell in the game rests on one order book: a player’s, a company’s, a state’s. There used to be two places goods could sit, and a sell in one could never meet a buy order in the other: you could list infantry at 1 while someone bid 1 for infantry and watch nothing happen. Now they cross the moment they meet.

A bid says “buy me this much at this price or better”. An ask is the reverse.
Both legs are escrowed the moment you place. A bid locks the levcoins, an ask locks the goods: so every resting order you see is backed by something real, and an order can never fail for want of stock.
A sell that crosses a resting bid fills instantly; only what does not cross rests.
The resting order sets the price. A bid that crosses a cheaper ask pays the ask, and the difference comes straight back to you.
Orders fill cheapest ask / highest bid first, ties by age.
You never trade with yourself: and a company never trades with itself either.
Cancel any time; whatever is still escrowed is returned.

Companies and states stand on this book too. A company’s goods are listed by the operator of the plant they ship from; a company bid, and every state order, is a board resolution or a law, because those commit somebody else’s money. See Companies and States.

Company-owned offers

A company can sell goods straight from its shared warehouse. The operator picks one of the company’s factories as the port of origin (that plant’s region sets the buyer’s tax, but the goods are debited from the warehouse, not that one plant. The proceeds go to the company warehouse, where they belong to every shareholder) never to the person who happened to click sell.

Because a dishonest operator could otherwise sell the company’s iron to his own alt for 1 Levcoin and pocket the difference, company offers have a price floor: a company with outside shareholders cannot list goods below 50% of the market’s current price for that item. A sole proprietor is exempt: selling to yourself cheaply costs you nothing.

If a resource has never traded, there is no reference price and so no floor; the first sales are free to establish one.

Taking a company offer down

The operator of the factory can cancel a company offer, exactly as he listed it: it appears in his My offers list alongside his personal ones, marked with the company’s name. The goods go back into the company warehouse, never into the operator’s own bag: listing and cancelling is not a way to walk off with the company’s iron.

Price history

Every tradeable item has a price screen: the same one the stock exchange uses:

Timeframes: 1H, 24H, 7D, 30D, ALL.
Drag across the chart to read the price at any moment.
Tap a price to load it into your sell ticket.
Volume has its own panel below the price. A big move on a single tiny trade is not really a move: volume is how you tell.

Prices shown are volume-weighted (VWAP), not “whatever traded last”. If 100 iron trade at 10 and then a single unit trades at 1,000, the honest price is ≈20, and that is what you will see. It means one stunt trade cannot move the market price.

State-owned offers

States trade on the same book as everyone else:

A state sells treasury resources by passing a Sell State Resources law. The goods are escrowed out of the treasury and stand as an ask under the state’s name: so a citizen’s standing bid can actually fill against it. The proceeds go to the treasury.
A state buys by passing a Buy Resources law, which stands a bid with treasury money; a president or minister with the Buy from Market power can also take an offer directly. Either way the resources land in the treasury.

Each law stands its own ask at the price congress actually voted for, rather than one law silently repricing goods an earlier one approved. A state’s resting orders are closed if the state itself ceases to exist.

Taxes

Work tax is taken from wages in the currency or resource earned and credited to the state treasury. Trade and import taxes are Levcoin charges. With direct purchases the buyer pays; on the matching order book the taker pays, including an incoming seller. Affordability is checked before settlement. Bloc open-market policy waives trade and import taxes between members. Diplomatic and loyalty surcharges are burned rather than paid to the treasury.

Diplomatic surcharges

Trade also reflects how you get along with the seller’s state:

State relations: buying from a state your state dislikes adds a surcharge of up to +50% at −50 relations (see Relations).
Citizen loyalty: buying from sellers in your own state while you’re disloyal to it adds up to +10% at −100 loyalty (see Citizen Loyalty).

These surcharges are paid on top of the price and burned (they don’t go to the seller). Good relations and open markets, by contrast, make trade cheaper.