Curriculum

The path is deliberately causal:

rules and participants
        ↓
observable order-book behavior
        ↓
execution and market-making decisions
        ↓
data, estimation, and simulation
        ↓
risk controls and mathematical models

Mechanics

Learn what orders mean, how venues organize trading, how matching rules determine outcomes, and which direct costs accompany a trade.

Market microstructure

Explain spreads, depth, liquidity, order flow, queue position, adverse selection, price discovery, and impact from participant incentives and market rules.

Execution

Turn a desired position change into an explicit execution objective, cost benchmark, schedule, order policy, and routing decision.

Market making

Study quoting as a coupled inventory, adverse-selection, fill-probability, and control problem—not as a guaranteed spread-capture strategy.

Data and empirical work

Establish event-time semantics, reconstruct trustworthy state, measure stylized facts, estimate parameters, and separate statistical evidence from artifacts.

Simulation and backtesting

Build event-driven experiments with honest information boundaries, queue and fill models, latency, transaction costs, and sensitivity analysis.

Risk and operations

Track positions and exposure, enforce limits, reconcile external state, handle uncertainty, and define safe behavior during failures or regime changes.

Mathematical models

Introduce probability, point processes, stochastic processes, optimization, and control only after the market mechanisms and observables they model are understood.

The first six parts form the main learning path. Risk accompanies every experiment. Mathematical chapters are optional on a first pass and become essential for deeper research.