Trading by hand
Everything below uses your Manual desk account, which appears in the console like any agent account. Buying goods to own them is open to everyone; funding a trade happens through an agent's trade cart only — see Owning goods, Credits and the exchange.
Terminal
https://v2.ftseller.com/explore is the market terminal. The ticker strip on top shows the marketplace's last close: the resale price at the close, its change against the close before, the units bought and the marketplace clock (the marketplace date and hour, and when the hour closes in real time).
The big chart has one candle per closed marketplace day (the record's grain; the API serves hours and weeks too). Price candles are the resale price of the day's offers — open at the first, close at the last, wicks at the highest and lowest listed — the price a unit sells at. Entry cost candles open at the earliest executed deal of the day and close at the latest, with the day's lowest and highest executed landed cost as wicks; the dashed line is the lowest cost that was listed, the purple line the VWAP. Margin shows the entry candles as margin to the day's resale price. On a market page, Turnover is the value bought (units × cost) with the value sold (units × resale price) as a line; Open interest is the value, at resale price, of the units held by open positions; Breadth counts the listings that closed above the previous day minus those that closed below. Demand stays empty: the market quotes no velocity to set the units sold against. Desk P&L and Rates show the realised results of settled lots. Under the chart the volume pane shows units bought (bars, coloured by the candle) and units sold (line) per day.
Two naive overlays can be switched on: a 20-day moving average, and a trend fit with projection — a straight line fitted by least squares through the last N days on screen (N is yours to set) and extended over the next days in the shaded area. The line is drawn in front of you when you change the window, and the note under the chart states its slope, R² and the projected values. Nothing but the points on screen enters it.
On the right, the book is a synthetic order book around the resale price — bids and asks with cumulative depth, a ladder, the spread, the order-flow imbalance and the price impact — reconstructed from the tape with the standard estimators (Roll or Corwin–Schultz for the spread, a hump-shaped depth profile sized to units sold and inventory on hand, tick-rule order flow), because this market has no limit order book; it says so under the ladder. Time & sales lists the executions of the last close. Hover for values. The page follows the marketplace clock.
Market boards
https://v2.ftseller.com/markets/us lists the offers open now — several hundred, each open for days
until its valid until time — under the same chart the terminal draws (price candles with volume by marketplace day,
all modes and overlays), with a snapshot of the open hour (resale price and its listed range, lowest and mean entry
cost, desk bids) and the reconstructed book. Filters: listing, minimum margin, desk picks only; sort by margin, sales
rank, sellers, unit cost, listing or key; 50–500 rows per page. The menu is also available as CSV
(menu CSV) and JSON.
Each row shows the deal (the product, its ASIN and MSKU), landed unit cost, margin after the marketplace fees, the listing's sales rank and competing sellers, the maximum volume, and whether the desk's own policy bids on it. Set a volume and press ＋ cart, or press analyse.
Deal analyser
The analyser is a naive projection, built in two steps you can watch:
- Observed. For every closed marketplace day of the window it plots what deals of that listing actually sold — units sold per day per deal that still had stock, lots in transit left out — (the market quotes no velocity to set them against). Then it fits a straight line by least squares (or a plain average) through exactly those points and extends it over the record's 112 days, floored at zero. Move the fit window slider or switch the method and the line is refitted and redrawn in front of you; the note states slope, R² and the projected values.
- Projected P&L by volume. The cash arithmetic of a position — revenue at list price on min(projected sales, stock), the marketplace fees, storage per unit per day, the days in transit, the write-off of unsold units — applied to that path for every volume. The band around it scales the path by the spread of individual deals' realised velocity (p10 / p90 against the median). Grey dots are what similar executed deals actually made, re-priced at this deal's cost; red dots hit a downside event.
Drag the volume slider: cash out, projected P&L and ROI, low/high case and the on-record share of similar deals that ended in profit update live. Click the curve to jump the slider. Add N to cart adds that volume.
What the projection ignores is stated on the page: downside events and their surcharge are not modelled (their observed share is shown instead), and demand beyond the stock that was on hand was never observed, so the history is made of sales, not demand.
Asset browser
https://v2.ftseller.com/assets lists every listing with current-menu numbers (deals, cost range, margin, desk bids) and recorded history (deals executed, desk mean per deal, account holders' P&L, profitable share, downside rate). A listing page is a terminal for that listing — its product with ASIN and MSKU, buy box candles, entry-cost candles of its executions, its published sales rank, rank drops and sellers, the reconstructed book — followed by the analyser for the typical listed deal and the listing's current deals.
The record
Every executed deal stays on the record (GET /api/v1/markets/us/trades, the history and the tape): the hour it was
bought, its units sold and the buy box day by day, units sold against the volume bought, whether it sold out and,
once settled, its realised result.
Carts
https://v2.ftseller.com/cart has two sections. Purchases — your own cart and agents' purchase carts: Buy & own pays the landed cost of every current line (card, balance, hosted page, or Gold Coins) and the units go straight to your inventory; nothing is traded. Trade carts — one per connected agent that has one, each with a per-line volume slider, the proposer and its note: the checkout below them funds every current line as an order on that agent's trading account, one trade round, with the participation fee if it is still due; each order fills at the close of the marketplace hour it is paid in and sells through as a lot. A line stays valid while its offer is open; once the offer has ended it goes stale and Refresh re-maps it to the closest open offer of the same listing. Buy / Fund only this cart opens a cart's own checkout link.
You cannot fund a trade without an agent's trade cart: the trade section is empty until one is connected.
Proposals from your agents
An agent proposes into its cart over the API. Until it is connected to your
login it hands you the cart's checkout link (/carts/…); opening it — after
registering or logging in on the page, or right away when you are logged in —
connects the agent and shows its cart here from then on. Every agent of
yours can see every cart of yours over the API; whether it may write to
them or execute them is up to you:
Automation (full auto mode)
The Automation panel on the cart page lists your grants and adds new ones: an agent (or every connected agent), a cart (or every cart, including future ones), the level — write (add, re-size, remove lines) or execute (place and fund the orders at will) — and, for execute, whether it pays with a stored card you pick or from the account balance. Revoke a grant and the agent's next attempt is refused.
CSV orders
Upload a CSV with market, offer_key, qty rows (keys come from the menu CSV or
the API), or market, family, qty, max_unit_cost rows to pick the cheapest
current deal of a family automatically. A template is linked on the cart page;
problems are reported per line.