IF FAQ Edit Wizard

1.1. How does USIFEX differ from The Foresight Exchange?

• Conditional claims.
• Automatic market makers for each claim to insure they will always have some liquidity.
  These market makers will also affect how money is distributed among traders, since USIFEX plans to insure that the traders start with small amounts of money, and that a large fraction of the money in the system will arrive via the market makers rather than initial grants to new traders.
• Support for 6 significant digit prices (versus 2 digits in FX).
  It also supports fractional quantities.
• Support for buying on margin (the current rules work roughly like buying stocks with a 50% margin maintainence requirement; these rules will probably be replaced with rules which take claim volatility and liquidity into account).
• Carefull scrutiny of claim wording by the exchange before trading is allowed. USIFEX will take more responsibility than FX has for insuring the availability of high-quality claims, and may even end up creating many of the claims rather than relying on traders to create them.
• An assurance that claims will be judged promptly (the exchange currently plans to take responsibility for judging all claims, and will not approve claims which might be time-consuming to judge).
• USIFEX is based entirely on Open Source software.
• USIFEX supports market orders and stop orders, whereas FX only supports limit orders.
  FX rejects buy limits above the ask price and sell limits below the bid price (which can be pretty annoying if the prices change while you are entering your order), whereas in USIFEX you merely see a warning (if you use the Preview Order option; if you place your order without previewing it, you won't be warned).

Other differences:

• Prices of boolean claims range from 0 to 1 on USIFEX (it simplifies some aspects of conditional claims).
• USIFEX supports several claim types to handle non-boolean ideas rather than forcing the range to always be 0 to 100.
  Note that this make it important use different size orders for different types of claims if you want to same value. Remember that you can trade fractional contracts.