Most introductions to finance teach you the vocabulary and stop. This one is written for the person who will go on to build the trading system — so every idea arrives attached to the number, the data structure or the failure mode you will actually meet in code. Five parts: what systematic trading is, what you can trade, what a derivative does, how markets are organised, and how a price is really made — one order at a time, inside a limit order book you can click.
Each part assumes the one before it. Part 1 gives you the machine — signal, risk, execution, infrastructure, monitoring — and the honesty to distrust your own backtest. Parts 2 and 3 fill it with instruments. Parts 4 and 5 explain the venue those instruments trade on, ending inside the order book where every price you have ever seen was actually made.
A rule you can write down, test, and run identically a thousand times — and the five pillars that keep it alive when it meets a real market.
Equities, bonds, FX, crypto, commodities: what each one actually is, what moves it, and why the same strategy code behaves differently on each.
Forwards, futures, options and swaps: contracts whose value is borrowed from something else, and the leverage that makes them useful and dangerous.
Primary and secondary, exchange and OTC, lit and dark, auction and continuous — who you trade against changes with the venue you chose.
The plumbing beneath every printed price: the limit order book, queue priority, the spread as a tax on urgency, impact, and what “liquid” measures.
One trade crosses seven stages between a tick arriving and a number changing in your P&L. Step through them. Each stage tells you what happens, what it costs, and which part of this site explains it — so the pipeline doubles as a table of contents. The clock and the money are cumulative: by the last stage you can see how much of the theoretical edge survived the journey.
A tick is sitting on the wire. Press Step to let it in.
Every fill you ever get came from somebody, and that somebody had a reason. The single most useful habit in systematic trading is asking who was on the other side, and were they happy about it. Pick a participant: their objective, holding period, instruments and profit engine tell you whether meeting them is an opportunity or a warning.
Read the five parts in order — each is about 25 minutes and each ends with three questions you should be able to answer without scrolling back up. Tick them off as you go; the ticks live only in this browser tab and nothing is sent anywhere.
Nothing here needs an account, a data subscription, a GPU or a broker. Every diagram on every page is drawn by the page’s own script from a seeded pseudo-random path, so the same slider always gives you the same market and you can argue with the numbers.
This site is deliberately language-agnostic and course-agnostic. When you want to turn the ideas into a running system, the three sibling sites take the same five parts down to the metal, each from a different direction.
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