About

What this is

An independent enthusiast site about markets as machinery: what the instruments legally are, how the plumbing works, and what the numbers actually say.

Every entry here defines the thing flatly before it says anything about it. A share certificate is described as a document with named parts; an order book as two sorted queues and a published rule; a settlement cycle as a sequence of administrative steps that somebody wrote down. Where a figure appears, it is taken from a named record — a rulebook, a notarial archive, an Act of Parliament, a methodology paper — and the record is named beside it.

What it is not

There is no advice on this site. Nothing here tells a reader what to buy, sell, hold or avoid. There are no strategies, no signals, no forecasts, no price targets and no performance figures. No product, platform, broker, fund or company is named as something a reader could put money into, and nothing here should be read as a suggestion that anybody act on any of it.

There are no dates on any entry either. Mechanism does not go out of date the way news does, and the historical material is set down in the past tense because that is where it happened.

How it is organised

Eight sections, 28 entries. The sections run from the instrument itself through the venue, the plumbing and the arithmetic, and end with three recorded episodes described as filed paperwork rather than as lessons. Every entry is reachable from the index band at the top of any page, from the sections page, or from the register.

The photographs

The photographs are real, credited beneath each figure, and chosen because they show the mechanism a paragraph is describing. Captions say what the picture cannot: none of them describes the image back to the reader.