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The Rat Exchange

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A stock market where news breaks before the price moves. Float a company, trade the gap, cash out at the arcade.

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About

You are a rat with a terminal and not much money.

More than eighty companies are listed, and any rat can float another one beside them. There is nobody to trade with and no order book to hide in. You buy from the company's own pool, and the price climbs while your order is still filling. Buy enough and you have made the thing expensive for yourself on the way in. That is not a bug. It is the only honest way to price a market this small.

The exchange does not wait for you. Every five minutes the prices drift, treasuries sweep their dividends out to whoever is holding, and the standing order you left last night fills at a number you never saw.


News breaks before the price moves. A story lands on the wire minutes before it reaches the company it is about. A report is right more often than a rumour, and neither one is a promise. That gap is the whole game: read it and you are early, chase the loud headline and you are the exit somebody else was looking for.

  • Back the story instead of the company. While a headline is still open you can call whether it lands or misses. There is no price on the wall, because the exchange is not on the other side of it. Everyone who called it wrong pays everyone who called it right, and the house takes its cut from the losing pot alone, so a winning call can never come back smaller than it went on. What you stand to make is set by how the other rats have called it, which makes reading the room a second way of being early.
  • Your first week is cheaper, never luckier. No trading fee at all for seven days, contracts worth double, and a quarter of your opening cash is already in a company the exchange picked for you out of the largest few, so your first look at the board is a position and not a blank page. The odds are the same as everyone else's. The costs are not.
  • Float your own company. Name it, seed it, and let strangers decide what it is worth. Half of every trading fee in it stops at its treasury and is swept out to whoever holds the shares. On the first day, that is you.
  • Leave a standing order for a price you have no intention of being awake for.
  • Lock cash in the vault for a day, three days or a week. It comes back with interest and it cannot be touched in between, which is the entire point of it.
  • Borrow against your shares at the desk instead of selling them, once you are three days in. Draw up to half of what you hold and pay for it every day it is out. Past eighty percent the desk stops asking and starts selling, and it will not wait for you to log in and explain.
  • Come back tomorrow for a claim that grows with every consecutive day for a month, a set of contracts, and a shelf of awards to fill. Every award you earn is a title you can wear on your profile, and the rest of the shelf shows you exactly what you have not done yet.
  • A season ends, and where you finished is permanent. Thirty days, ranked on what you made of what you were worth when it opened rather than on the size of the pile, so arriving late is not the same as arriving beaten. You place from a modest opening net worth upward. Nothing is staked and nothing is taken. When it closes the top of the board goes out on the wire, the placings are written against your name for good, and the next season opens the same minute.
  • The back room keeps ten arcade tables: coinflip, dice, slots, roulette, plinko, mines, higher or lower, crash, blackjack and the counter-offer. The odds are worse than fair and they are printed on the wall, every table's own numbers alongside the house edge in basis points. The counter-offer prices the Monty Hall problem so exactly that knowing the right answer buys you nothing at all. What is left is a choice about variance, which is the only reason it is a game. Plinko puts that choice in your hands twice over: pick the number of rows, then pick the shape. On a twelve-row board set to STEADY the slots either side of the middle hand your stake straight back and the far edge pays twenty-four times; set it to WILD and the middle keeps about half of what you put in while the far edge pays nearly ninety.


Underneath all of it is a market you can actually read: an index with its own chart, a treemap of the whole board, twelve sectors you can filter down to, leaderboards for the week and for all time, and a briefing that tells you what moved while you were gone. Every rat has a profile with their holdings on it, every company has a comment board, and the full rules of every system are in the terminal with the live numbers filled in, so nothing here is something you have to be told by another player.


It is a CRT, and it is yours: twenty-seven phosphor tubes from amber through to a shadow-masked colour set, scanlines, vignette, flicker and chromatic aberration all separately switchable, eight generated soundtracks that thin themselves out after dark, and interface scaling, larger text and a higher-contrast mode for anyone who needs them.


Nothing here can be bought with real money. The only thing for sale is a share in a rat's company, and the rat is you.

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The Rat Exchange player count history

7d range · hourly averages

Updates

5 updates
Version 1.1.3 The Glass HALO, on the SCREEN tab. Bright things bleed into the dark around them, the way a phosphor too far up its curve spills across the glass. 7 changes

Added

  • HALO, on the SCREEN tab. Bright things bleed into the dark around them, the way a phosphor too far up its curve spills across the glass.
  • Anything that already glowed is now lit past what the screen can actually show, and the bleed comes from that rather than from a second copy of the text drawn wider.
  • Body text is deliberately left where it was, so the things worth looking at glow and the small print stays sharp.

Improved

  • CHROMATIC ABERRATION used to draw every letter a second time in red and a third in cyan. It now pulls the whole picture apart the way a lens does, so it reaches the panels and their edges and not only the text.
  • The fringe grows towards the corners and leaves the middle of the screen alone, which is what a curved tube actually does.
  • Every tube keeps its own colours under HALO, so a green screen glows green instead of drifting towards amber.
  • Both effects still start switched off, and TURN THE TUBE OFF still clears them.
Version 1.1.2 The Runaway MARKET DEPTH on a company with almost nothing left in its pool used to report both sides matched and no push, which is not what an empty ladder means. 15 changes

Improved

  • MARKET DEPTH on a company with almost nothing left in its pool used to report both sides matched and no push, which is not what an empty ladder means.
  • It now says there is less than a whole share at every step, and it still measures which way the interest leans.
  • Depth is counted in fractions of a share behind the scenes, so a company with a thin pool gets the same push a fat one does instead of quietly getting none.
  • A quote for a single share said "1 shares", and a quote for a big one ran the share count together without its separators.

Fixed

  • A company's pool is pulled back toward the number of shares rats have not bought, and that pull was rounded down to nothing whenever the gap was under 200 shares.
  • The drift was rounded down as well, so a pool of ten lost a whole share to a tick that was asking for a hundredth of a percent, and gained nothing back on the tick that went the other way.
  • RAT sat on ten shares against a target of 209 for 99 ticks running: down one, up one, down one, at $3,501 a share on a company that opened at $2.
  • That leak was never only RAT. It takes up to a share a tick from any company with a small pool, which is most of the ones rats have floated themselves.
  • And a tick that asked for no movement at all skipped the walk home entirely, so a company on its way back stalled every time the noise landed on nothing.
  • So buying a small pool up worked exactly as it should and the walk back down never happened. Nothing was rigged in your favour; the road home was closed.
  • The pull is now at least one share whenever there is a gap, and the drift rounds to the nearest share instead of always down.
  • A pool that has been bought out now climbs back to where it belongs at a share a tick, so a company finds its way home over about a day.
  • If you bought RAT while it was stuck up there, the price coming back down is the fix arriving and not a second fault. Your shares are marked at what the pool will pay for them, and on the way home that is well under what you paid.
  • Separately, the upward trend was taking its half a percent a day out of the whole company instead of out of the shares still in the pool, so a tightly held company would have had its target eaten down to a single share in about nine days.
  • The trend now takes its rate out of the shares left in the pool and can never reach the shares rats own.
Version 1.1.1 The Founder's Share FLOAT called the whole seed recoverable by selling, when selling everything you hold returns what your own shares are worth, which the line above it already said. 3 changes

Fixed

  • FLOAT called the whole seed recoverable by selling, when selling everything you hold returns what your own shares are worth, which the line above it already said.
  • That line now shows the seed left in the pool behind the shares you did not keep, so the three figures account for exactly what floating costs you.
  • The claim got worse the less you kept: at a 5 percent stake it offered $10,000 recoverable against the $500 you could really sell for.
Show 2 older updates
Version 1.1 Supply and Demand MARKET DEPTH on every company: how many shares want in under the current price, and how many want out above it. 30 changes

Added

  • MARKET DEPTH on every company: how many shares want in under the current price, and how many want out above it.
  • Whatever the two sides do not match by leans on the price, so a company in demand climbs and a company being sold slides.
  • Interest close to the price counts for more than interest far away from it, the way it does on a real board.
  • Depth is redrawn every five minutes, so a company can sit in demand for hours and then turn.
  • You still buy and sell straight into the pool. There is no queue, and nothing has to take the other side of your trade.
  • Market depth was asked for by Skibidi Rizzler w/ The Big Gyatt
  • The vault deals two longer terms, 14 days and 30 days, and a month pays one percent a day.

Improved

  • The market trends upward over time instead of oscillating around the price it opened at.
  • The reversion target itself now climbs, which is what makes it a trend rather than a bias fighting a pull.
  • A founder's own stake is now marked at what the pool would pay for it, not at the opening price, on every screen that quotes it.
  • A founder's cost basis is recorded at what they actually paid, so the average price on a company you floated is right.
  • The most of a company a founder may keep on a float went from 50% to 90%.
  • The company page has been rebuilt: the ticker, the name and the price now share one line instead of stacking down the screen.
  • The figures that were buried in a list of eight rows are a labelled strip across the top, so market cap, volume, the pool, the range and the risk read at a glance.
  • The column beside the chart opens on the depth now, and your own position sits above the holder list rather than under it.
  • YOU vs THE MARKET is two clean lines instead of a filled band, so it is obvious which one is you and which one is the market.
  • A company's price chart is a line over a faint fill rather than a solid block, so the shape of the day is readable.
  • The chart legend names all three states, and the zero line is visible again.
  • Taking a vault deposit out early no longer wipes the interest. You keep the rate of the longest term you actually served, so a week broken after three days pays the three day rate.
  • Which means a long term is never worse than a short one held the same time, and picking the wrong one costs you the difference instead of everything.
  • The vault screen says all of this where you decide, instead of only on the help page.
  • A deposit's TAKE button now shows what it pays if you take it right now.
  • Contracts that count trades now ask that a trade be worth something. Ten of the sixteen counted trades, companies or standing orders without ever looking at the size, so a single share cleared any of them.
  • The floor is $100 and every contract that reads it says so in its own description, so the number on screen changes when the floor does.
  • The trend, the founder average price and the founder cap were all raised by Skibidi Rizzler w/ The Big Gyatt

Fixed

  • The feedback box takes more than one line, wraps, scrolls, and grows to fit what you have written.
  • Reported, from inside the broken box, by Skibidi Rizzler w/ The Big Gyatt
  • TODAY in the purse is measured from the server's own midnight mark instead of a number the terminal remembered. It used to compare against a figure the machine had stored, so after a wipe or an adjustment it quoted a change against money that no longer existed until midnight came round.
  • Fjord Motor Cheese held one price for four hours at a stretch and then jumped 7.7 percent, because at 13 cents a single cent was 7.7 percent of its price.
  • It has had a ten for one reverse split, so it now moves in the same detail every other company does. Nobody held any, so no position changed.
Version 1.0.0 Opening Bell Over 120 companies trade, each with a sector, a rated risk and a price of its own. 30 changes

Added

  • Over 120 companies trade, each with a sector, a rated risk and a price of its own.
  • Prices move every tick on their own, and nobody sets them by hand.
  • Buy and sell straight into the pool, so there is never a wait for someone to take the other side.
  • Standing orders sit on the market and fill while you are gone.
  • The market map shows the whole board at once, and the index tracks it as one number.
  • The wire breaks stories on companies before they land, and not all of them are true.
  • DEVELOPING shows what is coming, the tape shows what actually happened.
  • The book takes bets on whether a story lands, and the winning side splits the losing pot.
  • The rake comes off the losers only, so a winning call never comes back smaller than it went on.
  • Float your own company, name it, pick the ticker and keep a founder's stake.
  • Half of every fee paid on a company stops in its treasury and is swept out to its holders.
  • The vault locks cash for a fixed term at a rate agreed the day you agree it.
  • Longer vault terms pay more per day, and locked money still counts toward your net worth.
  • The desk lends against the shares you hold, with interest running daily.
  • Fall far enough behind at the desk and it sells you out, taking your cash first.
  • Ten tables in the back room: coinflip, dice, slots, roulette, plinko, mines, higher or lower, crash, blackjack and the counter-offer.
  • Every table publishes its own edge and its own numbers, and the only secret is the roll.
  • Walk away from a table mid hand and it pays out what it owed you a week later.
  • A daily draw pays more every day you come back, climbing for thirty days.
  • Three daily contracts and two weekly ones pay for playing the exchange rather than grinding it.
  • New rats pay no fees for their first week and arrive with a position already open.
  • Twenty two awards, from your first trade to ten million in net worth, and how rare each one is is published.
  • Wear any award you have earned as a title beside your name.
  • Leaderboards rank by net worth and by what you gained this week.
  • Seasons freeze the final placing, and a trophy stays on your profile for good.
  • Say something on any company, with what you hold shown next to your name.
  • Twenty seven phosphor tubes to run the screen in, from cold green through to full amber.
  • Text size, readability and interface scale, all separate and all remembered.
  • Eight music beds played by the same chip, each reacting to how busy the board is.
  • Custom cursors, a CRT overlay and a boot sequence worth watching once.

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