Underneath every stock price is a limit-order book and a matching engine running price-time priority in microseconds. How the book works, why the bid-ask spread is a real cost you pay, what market makers and HFTs actually do, and the honest mechanics of slippage, queue position, and adverse selection.
Trading
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Market Microstructure and Order Books -
Building a Paper-Trading Bot with the Alpaca API A practical guide to architecting a small live-trading system on a homelab using Alpaca's free paper trading API, alpaca-py 0.43, websocket streaming, and a Python state machine deployed via Docker Compose.