Market Mechanics Notebook

The brief#

Show, with a worked simulated example, that you understand what actually happens between placing a stock order and owning the shares.

This is the smallest piece of graded work in the course, and it stays that way on purpose: it exists to catch a shaky grasp of accounts, order types and exchange mechanics early, before Strategy Lab asks you to reason about risk on top of them. Tracing that order is also tracing the course’s first source of execution friction — the gap between the price you see and the price you get. Marks are for explaining and applying these mechanics in your own example, not for restating definitions.

What you submit#

A written notebook, 500–800 words, structured as four sections:

1. Account and order type — which kind of account you’re trading from (cash or margin) and which order type you used (market or limit), and why that order type fit the situation.
2. The trace — your simulated order followed from placement to fill: the bid/ask you saw, the price it filled at, and why it filled there rather than somewhere else.
3. What could have gone differently — one concrete way the same order could have filled at a different price or not filled at all, explained in plain language rather than restated definitions.
4. Why it matters — one sentence connecting this trace to the account type you chose in section 1.

All prices, quotes and trades are simulated and must be labelled as such throughout.

Before you submit#

Check that your trace is your own simulated order, not a hypothetical one, and that every number in it can be pointed back to something you actually saw on the simulated platform.