Learning Paths
One book, three ways through it. Pick your identity and read by stage — each stage says why it earns its place.
You want to trade perpetual futures and survive: understand your counterparties, the order book, and the mechanisms that can liquidate you.
You want to turn this market into testable models: microstructure, pricing mechanisms, efficiency and anomalies — ending in an arbitrage or market-making specialization.
You want to build trading infrastructure: from order books and matching to decentralized clearing-and-settlement architecture, embedded compliance, and AI infrastructure.
Trader
You want to trade perpetual futures and survive: understand your counterparties, the order book, and the mechanisms that can liquidate you.
- Stage 1Foundations
Why this market exists, and why the perpetual became its dominant instrument.
- Stage 2The Ecosystem
Every fill has a counterparty — know the participants, service providers, and structural trade-offs.
- Stage 3Orders & the Book
Order types are the language of trading; the order book is where price happens.
- Stage 4Funding & Liquidation
Funding-rate games, leverage-liquidation reflexivity, and the insurance fund — the three mechanisms that decide your P&L and survival.
- Stage 5Price & Volatility
Where price comes from, who governs the mark price, why volatility clusters — the cognitive basis of risk control.
- Stage 6Judging Venues
A five-dimensional framework for deciding whether a venue deserves your margin.
Quant Researcher
You want to turn this market into testable models: microstructure, pricing mechanisms, efficiency and anomalies — ending in an arbitrage or market-making specialization.
- Stage 1Foundations
The asset class's distinctiveness sets the boundary conditions of your models.
- Stage 2Microstructure
Order flow, the book, and matching mechanics — the physical layer beneath every quant signal.
- Stage 3Pricing Mechanisms
Funding rates, liquidation cascades, and insurance funds form the pricing dynamics unique to perpetuals.
- Stage 4Information & Efficiency
Price discovery, benchmark governance, informational efficiency — test the market before you test the strategy.
- Stage 5Volatility
Four-source decomposition, clustering mechanics, forecasting — the core components of any risk model.
Choose your specialization
Transmission mechanisms, the risks of arbitrage, anomalies — why risk-free arbitrage is not risk-free.
Liquidity-provision games, endogenous fragility, incentive design — market-making as liquidity governance.
Builder
You want to build trading infrastructure: from order books and matching to decentralized clearing-and-settlement architecture, embedded compliance, and AI infrastructure.
- Stage 1Foundations
Understand the asset class you serve and its unusual infrastructure demands.
- Stage 2Market Structure
Structural trade-offs, order language, and the book — the system's requirements document.
- Stage 3Mechanism Design
Hyperliquid's engineering, funding rates, insurance funds, benchmark governance — the mechanism is the product.
- Stage 4Quality & Regulation
Five-dimensional market quality and the economics of regulation — your objective function and constraints.
- Stage 5Architecture
From monolith to layered architecture, ideal decentralized clearing and settlement, embedded compliance — the book's engineering core.
- Stage 6Frontier
The thought experiment of perpetuals reshaping asset pricing, and the world after AI becomes market infrastructure.