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 worker catalog and router; its Runtime hosts the workers, loads their code (via pluggable engines) and dispatches incoming events to them.
WebSocketFeed	One outbound WebSocket connection to an exchange or data feed (Binance, Alpaca, …) as a WorkManager worker: it logs in, serves the topics an orchestrator tells it (serve), subscribing their venue items, and publishes each frame on its topic; it is driven with the worker RPCs and InvokeWorkerCommand. Workers never name a feed: their input topics are their whole dependency. It replaces the retired WebSocketManager service.
Worker	A piece of code — a .NET DLL, a Python script, C# source, a native shared library — that the WorkManager Runtime 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.