Glossary

Quick-reference definitions for the platform's vocabulary. For the "why" — the design rationale behind each concept — see Concepts; for the full, implementation-level technical glossary (event ADTs, CloudEvent extension attributes, executor types, and more), see lib.docs.virtufin.com/glossary.

Core domain concepts

Term	Definition
Market	The exogenous price universe the system observes — nothing inside the platform influences it. See the pubsub-topics spec's Market Data Events.
Portfolio	The collection of all positions a scenario holds (holdings per symbol, including cash).
Position	The holding of a specific symbol at a point in time — quantity, average entry price, and unrealized P&L. See the pubsub-topics spec's Position Lifecycle Events.
Strategy	The pair of decisions — what to do (decide) and how to carry it out (execute) — that turns market and portfolio state into trade actions. See lib's Behavior Layer.
Scenario	A named, registered configuration tying together a market data source, an initial portfolio, and a strategy — production trading, paper trading, a backtest, or a shadow run are all scenarios. See the scenarios spec.
Event	An immutable fact that occurred at a specific point in time — a tick, a fill, a position change. Everything in the platform is either an event, a derived state, or a stream of events. See the pubsub-topics spec's CloudEvents Envelope.
Signal	A value continuously derived from a log of events (e.g. current P&L) — never transported on the wire, always recomputed on demand. See lib's Behavior Layer.
Indicator	A signal that also folds in new data as it arrives, updating its own running state — a moving average is the classic example. See lib.docs.virtufin.com/glossary for the implementation-level definition.

The act/hyp dimension

Every scenario's market, portfolio, and strategy legs are independently either actual or hypothetical — this is what lets the same producer code serve production, paper trading, and backtesting without a code change (see Concepts's "Worlds & scenarios" section and the scenarios spec).

Term	Definition
act	The "actual" leg — a live data source, or a real account.
hyp	The "hypothetical" leg — replayed/synthetic data, or a simulated account. Always names a specific hypothetical world (bare hyp alone is never valid).
world	Which reality a market/portfolio/strategy leg runs against: act, or hyp.<name> for a specific named hypothetical (e.g. hyp.STRESS).
universe	The data-universe name for market data (e.g. EQ_EUROPE, BTC_202101_202206, or ALL for unrestricted) — present whether the market leg is act or hyp.
scenario triplet	The three legs — market {world, universe}, portfolio {world}, strategy {world} — that together fully define a scenario.
LIVE	The reserved scenario ID for production — {act, act, act}, auto-registered at service start.

Platform / service names

Term	Definition
API Gateway	The single service every client talks to over gRPC, and the only service that talks to Dapr pub/sub and state directly on behalf of the rest of the platform.
WorkManager	The host process for workers — loads worker code (via pluggable engines) and dispatches incoming events to it.
WebSocketManager	The proxy for outbound WebSocket connections to exchanges (Binance, Alpaca, …); workers talk to it through the API gateway.
Worker	A piece of code — a .NET DLL, a Python script, a native shared library — that WorkManager loads and runs, subscribed to events or commands.
TUI	The Textual-based Python operator dashboard (package virtufin-tui); a pure gRPC consumer of the API gateway, playing the role kubectl plays for Kubernetes.
OpenSpec	The platform's normative, scenario-driven (WHEN/THEN/AND) specification — every cross-cutting contract is defined there before any service implements it.