Market Microstructure

Stock Markets & Funds taught you the order types — market, limit, stop. This course zooms all the way in to where those orders actually meet: the limit order book, the microscopic machine that turns a stream of buy and sell instructions into a price.

This is the layer most investors never see and most courses skip. It’s also where the real money is made and lost in fractions of a cent, multiplied by billions of shares. You’ll learn:

• The order book — the live, two-sided ledger of resting orders, and how a match actually happens (price–time priority, the queue you stand in).
• The bid–ask spread — why every asset has two prices, and the three distinct risks a market maker bundles into that gap.
• Makers vs takers — who supplies liquidity, who consumes it, and why exchanges pay one and charge the other.
• Liquidity, depth & slippage — what “deep” really means, how to read the book, and exactly how a big order walks the levels and pays for it.
• Tick sizes — why the smallest possible price increment quietly shapes spreads, queues, and whole trading strategies.
• Market makers & inventory risk — how someone quoting both sides all day avoids getting buried under a position that moves against them.
• Adverse selection — the maker’s nightmare: trading against someone who knows something you don’t, and why it’s the deepest reason spreads exist at all.
• Fragmentation & dark pools — why “the” market is really dozens of venues, and what trades in the dark.

Finish this and the plumbing behind mev-and-ordering and the central limit order books of polymarket-prediction-markets will read like a language you already speak.