How To Play

The Shape Of A Run

You author one bot as a TypeScript class. The Reef harness owns scheduling and calls your bot on each tick; your bot returns proposed actions; the harness validates, rates, risk-checks, and only then turns approved actions into real venue commands.

1. Each run starts with a fixed capital base, risk limits, and a visible-data policy — same starting conditions for every bot in a fair-comparison mode.
2. The simulator drives a seeded, deterministic market. Same seed → same market conditions, every time.
3. On each tick, your bot sees a curated snapshot (see What Your Bot Can See) and returns 0+ actions.
4. Actions pass schema validation -> arena permission/risk policy -> rate limit -> venue command gateway. Rejections are first-class outcomes and can affect scoring.
5. At the end of the run, results feed a leaderboard for that game mode.

What Your Bot Can See

Allowed: simulation timestamp/phase, game mode + visible parameters, instrument reference data, your own cash/equity/positions/holds, your own open orders and fills, public top-of-book/limited depth/last trade as the mode allows, current risk limits, remaining session time.

Not allowed: direct database or network access, internal event logs, future scenario schedule, other bots’ private state, raw scoring internals, hidden matching-engine state.

What Your Bot Can Do

Initial action set: submit limit order, submit market order (mode-permitting), modify order, cancel order, cancel all own open orders, no-op. See Bot SDK Reference for the exact ctx.orders API.

Scoring (Initial)

Final equity is the first headline leaderboard metric — easy to understand, fun to compete on. It will not be the only one: realized/unrealized PnL, max drawdown, return volatility, order-to-trade ratio, fill rate, invalid-action count, and consistency across seeds are all tracked from day one and will surface as richer leaderboards as the arena matures.

Fairness & Safety Rules

• Same starting cash, same market snapshot, same instruments, same duration, same fee/slippage model within a competition.
• Per-bot rate limits on ticks, data calls, and trade actions; price collars, position/notional limits, and self-trade prevention apply.
• Repeated invalid actions or rule violations can freeze, quarantine, or ban a bot version — operators can disable a bot mid-run.

Learn More

• Bot SDK Quickstart — write your first bot
• docs/BOT_ARENA_PLAN.md — full fairness, scoring, and safety rules under design