The Traded Scale
One ruler for every market.
Gilts and gold. Whisky casks and airport slots. Carbon credits and Pokémon cards. Every entry here is measured on the same eight axes — so for the first time you can see how differently they behave, and exactly where each one goes wrong.
Explore the scale → Compare two markets Show me something
67 markets 8 axes 9 categories 26 venues
Eight questions, asked of everything
The two ends of the scale
The least and most demanding markets in the directory. Neither list is advice.
Gentlest
Browse by category
Nine families of tradeable thing, from the deeply liquid to the deeply illiquid.
Commodities
Raw material, standardised into contracts so that a tonne from anywhere is worth the same.
Shares & funds
Slices of ownership in companies, and the wrappers that hold bundles of them.
Debt & fixed income
Somebody else’s promise to pay, priced and resold.
Currencies & digital assets
Money traded against other money, plus the digital things that behave like it.
Derivatives & contracts
Contracts whose value is borrowed from something else’s price.
Property & land
The most widely held tradeable asset in Britain, and the slowest to sell.
Collectibles & physical goods
Things worth money because enough people agree they are — and keep agreeing.
Rights, claims & intangibles
Permission, entitlement and ownership of things you cannot touch.
Services, time & capacity
Labour, bandwidth, shipping space, electricity on standby — perishable and unstorable.
Worth understanding
Markets that set prices far outside their own corner of the world.
Exchange-traded funds
A fund that trades like a share, usually tracking an index for a few hundredths of a per cent a year — the most consequentia…
No. 053Residential property
The asset most British households hold most of their wealth in, bought with borrowed money, sold over months, and priced by …
No. 014Copper
The metal that wires everything, watched closely enough as an economic indicator to have earned the nickname Dr Copper.
No. 030Gold
The oldest continuously traded asset on earth, valued almost entirely for the fact that other people value it, and priced in…
No. 027Foreign exchange
The largest market on earth by turnover, running continuously from Sunday evening to Friday night, and overwhelmingly used f…
No. 018Domain names
Rented strings of text with no intrinsic value and occasionally seven-figure prices, transferred in minutes rather than mont…
Recently added
Advertising inventory
Human attention, auctioned in the time it takes a page to load — the largest and fastest continuous auction market most peop…
No. 059Timber & forestry
Land that grows its own return, taxed unusually favourably in the UK, and increasingly bought for carbon rather than for pla…
No. 063Used cars
The largest and most accessible physical asset market in Britain, with a wholesale layer most buyers never see and a depreci…
No. 051Radio spectrum
Licences to transmit on particular frequencies — a finite natural resource, auctioned by the state for billions, and the rea…
No. 049Prediction markets
Contracts that settle at one or zero depending on whether something happens, turning a probability into a price — and sittin…
No. 035Insurance & reinsurance risk
Risk itself, underwritten face to face in a London market that predates every exchange on this site and still works by broke…