How Stance works

Overview

Stance is social paper trading. You write a take, one sentence about where the market is going, and back it with a paper portfolio of long and short positions. From that moment the take is scored on real, live market prices until its deadline, and the final result stays on your profile for good.

Nothing on Stance is real money. There is no wallet, no deposit and no order sent anywhere. The prices are real; the positions are not.

Writing a take

1. Say it. Write your take in 3 to 280 characters.
2. Build it. Pick 1 to 8 markets. For each one choose long (you think it goes up) or short (you think it goes down) and a weight. Weights are whole percentages and must add up to exactly 100%.
3. Face it. Choose when it ends: 1 week, 1 month or 1 quarter. Then publish.

When you publish, our server reads the current price of every market and locks it as that position's entry price. Your browser never sends a price, so entries can't be picked or backdated. A published take can't be edited or deleted: the text, the positions, the entry prices and the deadline are fixed.

Where prices come from

All market data comes from Hyperliquid, a public perpetual futures exchange, through its public info API. Our server fetches it; nothing about you is sent with those requests. The list of markets you can pick from is every Hyperliquid perp that is currently listed, most traded first.

• Entry prices use Hyperliquid's mark price, read by our server the moment you publish.
• Live returns on open pages use the current mid price, which your browser reads from the same public API about every 20 seconds. The mid and the mark are usually within cents of each other.
• Charts use hourly candles: the closing price of each finished hour.
• Final prices use the last trade before the deadline (see Deadlines and results).

Market data can be delayed or briefly unavailable. When it is, live numbers pause and results wait; a failed request is never treated as a price.

How a take is scored

Each position earns its price move since entry, weighted by its share of the portfolio. Shorts count the other way: a short gains when the price falls.

Example. 60% long SOL entered at 100, and 40% short ETH entered at 2,000. SOL rises to 110 (+10%) and ETH rises to 2,100 (+5%). The take is up 0.6 × 10% − 0.4 × 5% = +4.00%.

Returns are shown to two decimals of a percent. A market that has no current price (for example after a delisting) counts as flat until there is one.

Deadlines and results

Every take ends 1 week, 1 month or 1 quarter after it's published, rounded up to the next whole hour in UTC. A take published at 14:20 UTC with 1 week ends a week later at 15:00 UTC. The exact time is shown on the take.

Final price. The final price of each market is its last trade before the deadline: the close of the last hourly candle that ends before it. It depends only on the market and the deadline, so it is the same whenever it's read, and every take with that deadline gets the same price.

Settling. About two minutes after the deadline, once the last trades are in, the final prices are read and stored, usually within minutes. Until then the take shows “settling” instead of a number. Once stored, a result is locked and can never change. If the market data can't be read, we try again later; a market with no trades at all in the 100 days before the deadline counts as flat.

The call. When the result is in, the take gets a label:

• Called it the final return is above 0.00%
• Missed the final return is below 0.00%
• Flat the final return rounds to 0.00%

Votes and the Hot seat

Anyone can agree or disagree with someone else's take. You can change your vote, or click it again to remove it, until voting closes. Votes close halfway between when the take was published and its deadline, so every call is made well before the result. You can't vote on your own take.

When a take ends, its page shows what the crowd thought against what the market did. The crowd was right if most voters agreed and the take was called, or most disagreed and it wasn't.

Hot seat. The take with the most votes cast this week, counted from Monday 00:00 UTC, among takes that are still open for votes, is pinned to the top of the feed. The weekly count resets every Monday.

Versus

Think a take is wrong? Challenge it. A challenge is a take of your own with the opposite view, and the two run head to head.

• Same start. The moment you publish a challenge, the server locks your entry prices and, in the same read, the challenged take's prices. Both sides start at 0% from that moment. The challenged take keeps its own score since it was first posted on its own page.
• Same finish. A challenge ends at the challenged take's deadline, and both sides use the same final prices.
• The winner is the side with the higher return at the deadline, compared to two decimals.
• When. Challenges are open until halfway to the challenged take's deadline. One challenge per person per take, never on your own take, and up to 20 per take.
• Really the other side. Your portfolio has to differ from theirs by at least 50 out of 100. Count each market as +weight when long and −weight when short, add up the differences market by market, and halve it. The same portfolio scores 0; flipping every side, or picking completely different markets, scores 100.
• Picks. Spectators pick the side they think wins. Picks close halfway between the challenge and the deadline. The two people in a versus can't pick.

The AI

• Build it with AI. Write your take, then let the AI suggest a portfolio for it: up to 4 markets, long or short, with weights that add up to 100% and a reason for each. It only picks markets you can trade on Stance, and you can change everything before publishing.
• Devil's advocate. Before you publish, ask the AI to argue against your take: its weakest point, the risks it skips and one question to answer. Revise it, or post it anyway and own it.
• Limits. Each account gets 15 AI requests a day, and the whole site has a daily cap so the AI stays available. Answers are automated, can be wrong, and are never financial advice.

Leaderboard

The leaderboard has two views. All time ranks people by their finished takes only: first by how many of their calls were right, then by their average final result, then by how many takes they have finished. You appear there once 3 of your takes have finished, so one lucky call can't top the board. A finished take counts as right when its final result is above zero at the precision shown (0.01%), and as missed when it's below.

Live ranks takes that are still running by their paper return on live prices. It moves as prices move and says nothing final: a take only counts for the all-time board once its deadline has passed and its final prices are stored.

Your account

There is no sign-up: no email, no password, no wallet. Your account is created the first time you post a take, vote or pick a side, and it lives in this browser. To keep it, save an account key in settings: a long code that gets your account and track record back in any browser. We show it once and can't recover it, so keep it somewhere safe, like a password manager. Anyone with the key can use the account, and making a new key turns the old one off. Without a key, clearing your browser data or switching devices starts a new account. Every new account gets a random @username, which you can change in settings, where you can also add a display name of up to 40 characters. Your name is always shown next to your @username, so two people can share a name but never a username. Your public profile at /u/your-username lists your takes, your versus record and your track record, counted from final results only. Takes, positions, votes, challenges and picks are public.

Read the terms and the privacy policy for the details. Stance is a game of opinions scored against real prices. Nothing on it is financial advice.

Limits at a glance

Write a take