A city teeming with life where assets, arbitrage, and pricing models get defined.
Xen is a place where two cities mirror each other. One city faces upward and is made of tall, silver buildings stretching into the clouds. The other city faces downward with upside down buildings made from rusted metal that felt but never engulfed water. I wouldn't let the upward and the downward representation of the cities and its people fool you. For just like a plant has soil underneath and through its roots, so are both these cities intertwined.
Most citizens in Xen are farmers. They take of trees, or portfolios, and work them by climbing to different parts of the tree and water-bending math functions onto the ridges of the tree's bark.
Currencies are monkeys who never age beyond their teenage years. Their style can be classified as "punk." Currencies wear clothes made from green vines. They normally hang out in the abandoned subway stations where they trade currencies by doing graffiti.
Options drive chariots, taking other assets for a ride above or below the strike price. Bonds look after trees bearing fruit.
Sometimes, silver forms on the walls of Xen much like mold forms in a damp bedroom. This silver is known as arbitrage. It doesn't take long for someone to scrape the silver off the wall of Xen or attach structures to the walls that extract a constant of flow of silver.
Functions from The Port of Monte Carlo frequently visit Xen to help the assets design a weave that protects them against Risk. The winds prize some assets for being risky or prone to hiccups, given their pricing models are not weaved as tightly to protect against Uncertainty. Some Models tried to mimic this behavior by creating Stochasticity, a drug that makes numbers change randomly.
Institutions
Institutions are insect-like creatures that live in Xen. Like bees, some Institutions pollinate. The Lawmakers make the Institution’s armor. One famous Institution is the Central Bank, which sets the Interest Rate, or gravity in Xen. The interest rate is like an ether that changes how Assets move and grow.
Stocks
The stocks play a game in between soccer and racing. They all ride on flying rocks bearing stickers that show the indexes each stock is part of. The stadium is made out of sandstone and rather than having a field of artificial grass in the middle, the stadium has a pool of water.
The point of the game is to use your whole body to pass a ball through a marble hoop similar to a Mesoamerican ballgame.
Each rock is coached by a company. At various points in the game, the company will throw a golden coin into the pool of water people refer to as the earnings call. The coin is the same consistency of honey and once it drops into the water, various spreadsheet fishes and algorithm jellyfish consume it.
People in the stands can use binoculars to spot the supply chains that relate each company to one another.
Companies
Companies are cute ants that wear colorful fur coats. The fur coats change like chameleons and are stylized by the famous fashion designer, ISO 20671.
Standards
A Standard like ISO 20671, is a fairy-like creature made of cloth and water. Standards fly around Bakuh after being raised inside dens that are a cross between a beehive and a vending machine. It wouldn't be a new year without ISO 8601, one of the Standards created by the International Organization for Standardization.
