In the last lesson you learned the four halls of the market and the one rule they all share: pick a product, see the sellers, buy or list. Now we add the single most important wrinkle, the one thing that trips up nearly every brand-new player, so let us slow right down for it. Every product trades on two separate markets, not one. And it genuinely matters which of the two you happen to be looking at, because they are different worlds with different prices.
Do not worry, you will not have to go hunting for them. On every product page there is a tab at the top that simply switches between the two. One click and you flip from one market to the other. The reason this matters so much is that the two markets do not share prices or buyers, so the same product can cost quite different amounts depending on which tab you are standing in. Let us meet them both.
Before we do, here is a gentle picture to hang the whole idea on. Imagine the same kind of bread is sold at two different markets in two different towns. The price at the little market down your own street, where your neighbours shop with the cash in their pockets, has nothing forcing it to match the price at some grand international fair in a faraway city where merchants from everywhere gather. Each crowd sets its own price, in its own money. That is precisely the relationship between your Local and Global markets. They are not two views of one price; they are two genuinely separate markets that happen to sell the same goods, and you are welcome at both.
Your home market: Local
The Local market is priced in your country's own currency, and it is visible only to citizens of your own country. Think of it as the marketplace in your home town square, where only your neighbours shop and everything is priced in the money you all use day to day. It is friendly, it is close, and for most of what you buy and sell early on, this is where you will live. Because it is just your countryfolk trading with each other, it tends to reflect what your particular country has plenty of and what it is short on.
The wide world: Global
The Global market is priced in gold, the game's premium currency, and it is open to everyone in the game whatever country they call home. This is the grand international exchange, where a player on the far side of the world can buy from you and you from them. The catch, if you want to call it that, is that everything here is priced in gold rather than your local cash, so trading globally means trading in the more valuable currency. That makes it powerful, but it is a slightly bigger pond to swim in.
Why the two prices drift apart
Because these are two completely separate books, with their own sellers and their own buyers, the same product can sit at a different price locally and globally at the very same moment. There is nothing strange or broken about that; it is just supply and demand doing its quiet work. A good is usually cheaper where it is plentiful and dearer where it is scarce, so the local and global prices rarely line up exactly. Spotting those gaps, and buying where a thing is cheap to sell where it is dear, is one of the small joys of trading well, and we will come back to it.
You might reasonably ask which market you should care about first, and the honest answer is that for most of your early life it will be the Local one. It is priced in the money you already earn from your own town, so there is no currency to fuss over, and it is full of your own countryfolk, who are buying and selling the very things a town like yours tends to need. The Global market is always there waiting whenever you want a bigger audience or a better price, but you can grow happily for a long while trading mostly with your neighbours. Think of Global as the door you push open when a deal at home is not good enough, rather than somewhere you must rush off to from day one.
There is one more practical difference worth tucking away. The smallest price you are allowed to set is different on each market. On a local market you can go down to 0.0001 in your local currency. On the global market you can go all the way down to 0.000001 in gold, which is four extra zeros after the point, six in total. Why the extra zeros for gold? Simply because a single unit of gold is worth so much more than a unit of local cash, so you need finer steps to price things sensibly. If you ever try to set a price and the game nudges you to a slightly larger number, that minimum is the reason, and it is just keeping your prices to sizes the market can actually use.
A worry I can lay to rest right now: you do not have to choose between the two markets forever, or even for the day. They are not rival camps you must join one of. You might buy your wood cheaply on your local market this morning, then sell your finished planks on the global market this afternoon, simply because that is where the better deal happened to be. Flipping the tab is free and instant, and you can keep an offer running on local while you browse global. So think of the two markets as two windows onto the same product, both always open to you, never a fork in the road you can only take once.
Swapping one currency for the other
What if you want to trade globally but you only hold local cash, or the reverse? You are not stuck. A separate currency exchange on your Home dashboard swaps gold for your local currency at the day's official rate. So you can always convert what you have into what a particular market wants, and then come back to trade.
That is the whole idea: two markets, two currencies, two prices, one tab to flip between them. Carry that with you and the rest of the chapter falls into place, because every lesson from here on quietly assumes you know which market you are standing in. Next we will actually buy something, which is the easiest and most satisfying thing you will do all chapter.