Markets are not naturally occurring instead they consist of a group of humans referred to as the "Trading Crowd."  In a classroom setting the students in the class are the trading crowd.  A primary function of markets is to discover prices for the scarce resources, e.g., financial securities, being exchanged among individuals in the trading crowd.  The securities being traded in the demonstration case are all fixed income securities, coupon bonds and zero coupon bonds.  An important task facing the trading crowd is to discover the prices for each security given the physical environment as described in FTS Trading case B02.

However for price discovery to work some traders must be prepared to submit bids (to buy) and or asks (to sell) to the market for some specified quantity.  In the above screen the best bid (i.e., the highest bid at a point in time) is displayed for each security under the Bid column, and the best Ask (i.e., the lowest Ask) under the Ask column.  The first number in each pair is the price and the second number after the / is the quantity being bid or asked for.  For example, beside Cp Bond 100.20/550 implies the best bid is 100.20 for up to 550 units. 

How do we trade in this market?  You are able to take three basic actions:

i.  Submit bids to buy or asks to sell as a market maker (i.e., a limit order) for some specified quantity.

ii.  Sell to the prevailing bid or buy from the prevailing ask as a market taker (i.e., a market order) for a quantity upto what is available in the market.

iii.  Sell to prevailing bid or buy from the prevailing ask as a market taker with a price protected order (i.e., a market limit order) for a quantity up to what is available in the market.

What do I click on to trade? 

Refer to the above screen you can trade by a single click on the security name to highlight the security you wish to trade in.  In this case this is Cp Bnd.  This appears in the top center part of the screen.  Then to make market enter a price beside the Price text box and a Quantity beside the Quantity text box (e.g., Price = 100.3 and Quantity = 1000 in above example).  Then click on either Bid or Ask to transmit to the market as a limit order.  Additional details are provided in the online trading manual.

Similarly, if you wanted to transmit a market limit order for this price and quantity click on the Buy or Sell button and finally if you want to transmit a market order then delete the price from the price text box and click on Buy or Sell so only a quantity is transmitted. 

You can also use hand signals to trade -- hold the cursor over any part of the demonstration screen to get a brief description of it's function.  The up or down hand signal lets you raise an existing bid or lower an existing ask for the quantity in the quantity text box.  By how much is this raised?  You set this in the Options menu as follows:

In this case the default is set to 0.10.

By running the interactive demo you can practice submitting different order types to the market plus you can read the online manual to check on finer points if desired.