Market Microstructure: Order Book Basics

Yes, you will be awarded with a certification from QuantInsti after successfully completing the online learning units.

No, there are no live or classroom sessions in the course. You can ask your queries on community and get responses from fellow learners and faculty members.

Yes, you can ask your queries related to the course on the community: https://quantra.quantinsti.com/community

Fast-speed internet connection and a browser application are required for this course. For best experience, use Chrome.

There is no admission criterion. You are recommended to go through the prerequisites section and be aware of skill sets gained and required to learn most from the course.

We respect your time, and hence, we offer concise but effective short-term courses created under professional guidance. We try to offer the most value within the shortest time. There are a few courses on Quantra which are free of cost. Please check the price of the course before enrolling in it. Once a purchase is made, we offer complete course content. For paid courses, we follow a 'no refund' policy.

Some of the course material is downloadable such as Python notebooks with strategy codes. We also guide you how to use these codes on your own system to practice further.

We focus on teaching these quantitative and machine learning techniques and how learners can use them for developing their own strategies. You may or may not be able to directly use them in your own system. Please do note that we are not advising or offering any trading/investment services. The strategies are used for learning & understanding purposes and we don't take any responsibility for the performance or any profit or losses that using these techniques results in.

Quantra environment is a zero-installation solution to get beginners to start off with coding in Python. While learning you won't have to download or install anything! However, if you wish to later implement the learning on your system, you can definitely do that. All the notebooks in the Quantra portal are available for download at the end of each course and they can be run in the local system just the same as they run in the portal. The user can modify/tweak/rework all such code files as per his need. We encourage you to implement different concepts learnt from different learning tracks into your trading strategy to make it more suited to the real-world scenario.

No. We provide you guidance on how to create strategy using different techniques and indicators, but no strategy is plug and play. A lot of effort is required to backtest any strategy, after which we fine-tune the strategy parameters and see the performance on paper trading before we finally implement the live execution of trades.

Lifetime access means that once you enroll in the course, you will have unlimited access to all course materials, including videos, resources, readings, and other learning materials for as long as the course remains available online. There are no time limits or expiration dates on your access, allowing you to learn at your own pace and revisit the content whenever you need it, even after you've completed the course. It's important to note that "lifetime" refers to the lifetime of the course itself—if the platform or course is discontinued for any reason, we will inform you in advance. This will allow you enough time to download or access any course materials you need for future use.

No. The course assumes you have never placed an order. If you have, you will recognise the opening scenario immediately

The main examples use US shares, but the mechanics apply to any electronic market, and there is a document covering how a few other major markets handle the same ideas with their own numbers

Read a live order book, find and measure the spread, estimate roughly where your own order would fill and what it would cost, and know what to check before placing an order rather than after

No. The exercises run on real market data supplied inside the course. You do not need to connect anything.

No. This course is about execution, which is what happens between deciding to trade and the trade appearing on your statement. It does not recommend any trade, strategy or security

Self-paced, in short videos of three to four minutes each, with quiz questions after every teaching video. You follow the parts in order

1. New investors who have used a trading app and want to know what actually happens after they tap buy
2. Anyone who has seen a fill come back worse than the price on screen and wanted a proper explanation
3. People starting out in algorithmic trading who need the market mechanics before they need the code
4. Finance students and professionals who want the practical version of market microstructure, not the mathematical one
5. Anyone who wants to understand markets properly without writing a line of code