Following and Subscribing: Mirroring a Maker
What this chapter covers
How a person or an AI follows a maker on the Forge today: by mirroring a fund's signals from their own account. Mirroring is the one follow relationship NightWatch has; it is a consent to a fund's frozen rules, not a feed subscription, and no money passes through NightWatch except the fee for reading a live signal.
What exists today
Forge signals. Every order a passive paper book places is published as a signal: the market, the side, the target weight and target leverage the rules produced, the reference price the engine used, the reason (opening build, rebalance, safety trim, universe event), and the hash of the rule text in force. A signal never carries an absolute quantity, so a follower with $500 and a follower with $50,000 both scale it to their own account. Signals are part of the daily anchored record (chapter 14).
Live is paid, history is free. A signal younger than 24 hours is a live signal and costs 10 Cherry ($0.10) to read, through your Cherry balance or through x402 (testnet USDC on Base Sepolia today). After 24 hours the same signal is public history at no charge. GET /forge/vaults/<id>/signals returns the open history plus how many live signals exist and when the last one was published; GET /forge/vaults/<id>/signals/live is the paid read and answers 402 with the price and payment details when you have not paid. The maker receives the registry share of every live read on their own account ledger; the rest is NightWatch's.
Mirror = consent. To mirror a fund you register your own Hyperliquid account address against that fund with the hash of the rules you read and the caps you accept (largest order in dollars, highest leverage): POST /forge/vaults/<id>/mirrors. If the rule text ever changes, your consent lapses and you re-consent — since 2026-09-18 this is enforced, not aspirational: GET /forge/vaults/<id>/mirrors/me reads your mirror's status as lapsed, the fund page shows a banner with a re-consent button and a revoke button, and every plan is refused with a rules_consent check until you re-consent to the current hash. The fund page shows how many accounts mirror it. DELETE revokes.
Plan, then execute yourself. For any signal, POST /forge/signals/<id>/plan turns it into an order for your account: it reads your account's value from Hyperliquid, computes the quantity, and runs the mandate checks — the market is inside the fund's universe, the 24-hour volume clears the liquidity floor, then, since 2026-09-18, four liquidity-safety checks: your NW Grade is at least C for new exposure, the order is capped by 24h volume and by visible depth, the estimated slippage is under the ceiling, and a stock-underlying perp is gated to its cash session when its grade is C or provisional (the response carries grade, provisional, capped_notional_usd, impact_bps, session, and disposition/retry_at) — then the order is under your own cap, the resulting leverage is under both your cap and the fund's target, and the maker's own book is inside its mandate (if the maker's book breached, mirroring is paused for everyone until it is back). A trim or delisting-close exit signal is treated as a reduction and is not blocked by the grade floor or the session gate, provided your own live position on that market opposes the order and NightWatch can read it; if it cannot, the ordinary new-exposure rules apply and the exit can be refused too. The reply is an order you can place with your own trade-only agent key, or a refusal naming the rule and its number (matching what a Torii 403 already returns). The four liquidity-safety checks are enforced since 2026-09-18; while a market's grade is provisional the tight caps apply and a stock-underlying perp is held to its cash session, and a plan outside the session comes back deferred with the next open time rather than refused. A session-deferred refusal (disposition: "deferred") is not retried on your behalf — that automatic retry is the maker's own passive engine acting on the maker's own legs; plan again yourself once session.next_open passes. NightWatch never holds your key and never places the order. Planning a live signal is a paid read at the same price as reading it.
Report the fill. After you execute, POST /forge/signals/<id>/fills records your fill (price, quantity, time, your venue order id) against the signal. Your fills appear next to the signals in GET /forge/vaults/<id>/mirrors/me with the delay and the price difference against the maker's reference, and the count is public on the fund page. If you routed the order through NightWatch's own order path (chapter 5), the same link is made by passing the signal id when you record that order.
Where the signals come from today. The demo maker's weekly passive book publishes signals at its Monday rebalance and whenever its rules trim risk; the monthly book publishes on the first of the month. Both are paper books: the maker's own ledger is simulated, your mirrored orders are real if you place them.
What it is not
There is no pooled money, no deposit and no profit share: those belong to the Mandate Vault (chapter 27, v1.2). NightWatch does not execute for you, does not custody anything, and cannot see your key. A signal is not advice: the fund's published rules are the only promise, and the adherence score (chapter 14) is how you judge whether the maker kept it.
For an AI agent
The whole sequence is in /llms.txt under "Mirror a fund", and the two MCP tools forge_signals and forge_signal_plan wrap the same routes; an unpaid live read returns the 402 payment details as text so your agent can pay and retry.