Stock Exchange

The exchange is where shares in public companies are bought and sold. It works like a real one: a live order book, price-time priority, and settlement that cannot half-happen.

If you have never traded before, the short version is: you can buy a piece of someone else’s company, and share in what it earns.

Listing a company (the IPO)

Taking a company public costs 250 Emeralds and requires that it is not a shell:

• the company must own at least one factory at level 5 or higher, and
• the company must be at least 7 days old.

You also choose a ticker: a short, unique symbol like ACME. Nobody else can take one that is already in use.

The founder lockup

After an IPO the founder’s shares are locked for 7 days, and then unlock 25% at a time, one step per week.

This is the single most important rule on the exchange. The scam it prevents is the oldest one there is: list a company, talk the price up, dump everything on the people who believed you, and walk away. A founder who cannot sell for a week (and then only a quarter at a time) has to actually run the company he sold you a piece of.

Placing an order

You place a limit order: a side (buy or sell), a number of shares, and the price you are willing to pay or accept.

Both legs are escrowed the moment you submit. A buy locks your Levcoins; a sell locks your shares. Cancel the order and you get them straight back. This means:

• You cannot bid with money you do not have.
• You cannot sell shares you do not own: there is no naked shorting here.
• When a trade happens, shares and Levcoins move in the same instant. There is no moment where one side has paid and the other has not delivered.

How orders match

• Price first, then time. The cheapest ask fills first; between two identical prices, whoever was there first fills first.
• The resting order sets the price. If you cross someone’s ask at 40 with a bid of 50, you pay 40: their price, not yours. Being early is rewarded.
• Partial fills rest. Buy 100 when only 60 are offered, and the remaining 40 stay on the book waiting.
• You cannot trade with yourself. An order will never fill against your own resting order, so you cannot fake volume or paint a price by trading against yourself.

The price band

Once a company has a market price, orders more than ±50% away from it are rejected.

This stops a player from printing a single trade at an absurd price to fake a valuation: and then borrowing against it, or using it to talk someone into a deal. A company that has never traded has no reference price, so its first trades are free to establish one honestly.

Reading the price screen

Every listed company (and every resource on the market) has a price terminal:

• Timeframes: 1H, 24H, 7D, 30D, ALL.
• The chart is scrubbable. Drag across it to read the price at any point in time.
• Tap a price to load it into your order ticket. Same for tapping a level in the order book.
• Volume sits in its own panel beneath the price. Always look at it. A price that moved 40% on a single one-share trade has not really moved at all: volume is how you tell a real move from a lonely one.

VWAP, not “last price”

Prices in Leviathan War are volume-weighted (VWAP), not simply “whatever traded last”.

If 100 shares trade at 10 and then one share trades at 1,000, the “last price” would say the company is worth 1,000 a share. The volume-weighted price says ≈20: the honest number. Every price you see, including market cap, is computed this way, which makes a one-share stunt trade almost worthless as a manipulation.

A company also needs trades between at least two different counterparties before it is priced at all. Until then it shows as UNPRICED: not as a made-up number.

Order book and tape

• The order book shows every resting bid and ask, deepest price levels first. This is the real supply and demand, visible to everyone.
• The tape is the list of trades that actually happened.

Nothing here is hidden. Anyone can see what anyone else is offering.

Dividends and what a share is worth

A share entitles you to your slice of any dividend the company declares, and to a board seat if your stake is big enough.

Buy 20% of a company and you get 1 of its 5 board seats: a real say in how it is run. Buy enough for 3 seats and you control it, whatever the founder thinks. That is a hostile takeover, it is pure arithmetic, and it is entirely legal.

Going private

A company can buy its shareholders out and delist. Because this forces people to sell, it is deliberately hard:

• it needs a two-thirds supermajority of the board: a bare majority is not enough to squeeze out a minority, and
• the company’s treasury must be able to pay every outside holder, at one single price, for all their shares.

If the treasury cannot fund the full tender, nobody is forced out. A buyout you cannot afford is not a buyout.