Learn markets by
running one
Textbooks describe order books. EduMatcher lets you place an order, watch it rest, get hit, and appear in the audit trail — and then read exactly which lines of code did it.
See it run first
The Quick Start gets a live exchange on screen in minutes, then a first trade, a full trading day and your own configuration — with a checkpoint at every step.
Concepts, then code
Every chapter opens with learning objectives and builds from the finance idea to the data structure to the source file that implements it.
Break it on purpose
Halt a symbol, trip a circuit breaker, kill a process, replay the audit trail. A venue that can be broken safely is one you can understand.
Start anywhere,
go as deep as you like
If markets are new, start with Exchange Concepts: An Introduction (a general book about exchanges, not about EduMatcher). Then work through the Quick Start and branch by what you want to do.
Every box in the map is a link.
The heart of
a matching engine
Every trade on the exchange is born in one file, order_book.py. The chapter The Order Book: Deep Dive in the Architecture & Development Guide walks through it function by function, quoting the real code.
The book needs no network, so a ten-line script can drive it. Set one breakpoint, press Step Into, and follow an order through process → _match_limit → _sweep → _apply_fill → _rest. Once you have watched that sequence of events, the rest of the exchange is plumbing around it.
- Price-time priority as one tuple key,
(±price, arrival_seq), on a min-heap - Five side indexes, and the question each one answers
- Lazy deletion: a cancel is O(1), and
_peekclears dead entries off the top - Icebergs, self-match prevention, stop cascades, OCO legs and auction mode
- A book-lab script, launch configurations, breakpoints and experiments to try
BUY LIMIT 400 @ 100.10 against three asks. Keys, quantities, calls and lines are those of order_book.py; use the buttons to step like a debugger.8 guide books
Each book is written for one reader and one task. Read online, or download as PDF (light and dark, A4 and B5) and EPUB from the Download page.
Quick Start Guide
Install, first trade, a full trading day and your own configuration — a checkpoint at every step.
Training Guide
29 hands-on chapters: order types, auctions, market making, risk, clearing, protocols.
Participant Guide
The order book, every order type, auctions, market making, bots, P&L and the trading screens.
Operator's Guide
Install, configure, run, supervise and recover an exchange — gateways, risk, audit, persistence.
Protocols and Clients
ALF, BALF, CALF, RALF, LALF and REST/WebSocket — specifications, sessions and client examples.
Reference Manual
Every command, port, configuration field and a finance glossary.
Architecture & Developer Guide
The design, the data structures, the code tour and how to change it with confidence.
AI Traders & Market Simulation
An exchange that trades itself: AI traders, hidden true values, news and rumours.
Exchange Concepts: An Introduction
A general introduction to how financial exchanges work: order books, matching, auctions, risk, clearing and market data. It is written for readers who are not finance experts — software developers included — and explains the ideas every exchange is built on, whichever software runs it.
- General, not product-specific: it does not document EduMatcher. Read it before the guide books, or alongside them whenever a market term stops you.
- 46 chapters in four parts: markets and participants; orders, matching and the trading day; risk, clearing and compliance; technology and market ecology.
- Real-world grounding: a tour of real exchanges, historic notes and cautionary tales such as Knight Capital.
The edition number follows its own scheme and is independent of the EduMatcher version (v0.77.0).
The Training Guide:
29 exercises
A self-paced course in five parts. Every chapter is a set of commands to run and results to predict, check and explain.
| I · Foundations | install, configure, market-maker liquidity, your first trade |
| II · Trading mechanics | amend, order types, time-in-force, auctions, cancels |
| III · Liquidity, risk, results | market making, combos, risk controls, P&L, market data, AI traders |
| IV · A full session | statistics, persistence, capstone scenario, observers, admin |
| V · Integration | drop-copy, automation, RALF, CALF, REST/WS, index, ALF and BALF gateways, IPO valuation |
A class-sized market,
on demand
An exchange that is never empty
A single container runs 100 AI traders across 300 symbols, with a hidden true value, headlines and rumours. Students trade next to the bots and see prices react to news they can read.
Accelerated time
Compress a trading day into minutes so a lecture can include an opening auction, a news shock and a close.
One URL per student
API keys map to participants and roles. Give each student a trader key; put TapeDeck on the projector; keep the Operator Dashboard on your own screen.
Grade the evidence
The audit trail and clearing P&L record exactly what each participant did — perfect for post-session debriefs and assignments.
Slide decks
Presentations for lectures and workshops — an introduction to EduMatcher, the full training course and topic decks for each protocol and tool. Available as PDF; editable PPTX sources live in the repository.
Extend it
The Architecture & Developer Guide includes an Exchange Experiments Roadmap — concrete ideas for new order types, matching rules and market-structure experiments, each small enough for a course project and each grounded in a deterministic test harness.