Quantitative Trading
For traders who want the layer underneath the charts. Understand how Indian markets are really built, the mathematics that describes price, and how to find an edge that survives - even the hard maths explained in plain words, with visuals, on live OpenAlgo data.
The Quant & the Indian Market Map
Who quants are, how Indian markets are wired, and what a trade really costs.
What a Quant Actually Does
The real job behind the word - the roles, the skill stack, and how a quant thinks differently from a discretionary trader.
The Map of Indian Markets
NSE and BSE, cash and derivatives, the headline indices, and the cast of participants who move prices.
The Plumbing: SEBI, Clearing & Settlement
How a trade actually completes - the regulator, the exchanges, clearing corporations, depositories, and T+1/T+0.
The True Cost of a Trade
STT, stamp duty, exchange and SEBI charges, GST, brokerage - building the all-in cost model that quietly kills most edges.
Market Microstructure
How prices are really formed - the order book, liquidity, impact, and speed.
The Limit Order Book
Bids, asks, depth and price-time priority - the live queue where every Indian trade is matched.
Price Formation & Auctions
The matching engine, the tick-size regime, and the pre-open and closing call auctions that bookend the day.
Liquidity, Spread & Market Impact
Why your own order moves the price - spread, depth, resilience, and measuring impact in real names.
Circuit Breakers, Bands & Surveillance
Index halts, scrip price bands, ASM/GSM and the F&O ban - and how they distort the signals you compute.
Order Flow & Participants
Informed vs uninformed flow, participant-wise open interest, and reading FII/DII activity.
HFT, Colocation & Latency
The microstructure of speed - colocation at NSE, tick-by-tick data, latency arbitrage, and what's feasible for whom.
The Mathematics of Markets
Probability and statistics for trading - explained in plain words, with charts.
Returns & the Stylized Facts
Simple vs log returns and the empirical truths of markets - fat tails, volatility clustering, and the leverage effect.
Probability & Monte Carlo
Random variables, expectation and variance, and using simulation to price what you can't solve by hand.
Inference & the Multiple-Testing Trap
Hypothesis tests, p-values, and why testing 500 ideas almost guarantees a fake winner.
Stationarity & the Random Walk
Why prices wander unpredictably, how to test for it, and what the efficient-market idea gets right and wrong.
Time Series & Econometrics
Modelling how today's market depends on yesterday's - mean reversion, volatility, regimes.
Time-Series Models (AR, MA, ARIMA)
The classic models for series that remember their past - and an honest look at what is and isn't forecastable.
Volatility Modeling (GARCH)
Volatility has a memory - calm follows calm, storms cluster. ARCH, GARCH and EWMA make that precise.
Mean Reversion & Cointegration
The man-and-his-dog idea behind pairs trading - two wandering prices on a leash that always snaps back.
Regimes & Structural Breaks
Markets switch between calm bulls, grinding bears and violent shocks - detecting the regime you're in.
Derivatives, Volatility & Options
The options machine - pricing, the Greeks, the volatility surface, and trading vol itself.
No-Arbitrage & the Synthetic Future
The most powerful idea in pricing - free money can't exist - and how put-call parity builds a synthetic future you can price options against.
Black-76 & the Greeks
Why Indian F&O is priced with Black-76, not Black-Scholes - off the forward (the synthetic future) - and the Greeks that show how an option breathes: delta, gamma, vega, theta.
The Volatility Surface & India VIX
Implied volatility, the skew and smile, the term structure, and reading India VIX as the market's fear gauge.
Trading Volatility
Volatility as an asset - variance trades, gamma scalping, the vol risk premium, and Indian expiry-day effects.
Portfolio Construction & Risk
From one trade to a book - diversification, factors, sizing, and surviving the tail.
Portfolio Theory & Its Limits
Diversification as the only free lunch - mean-variance, the efficient frontier, and why it breaks in practice.
Factor Models & Equity Risk
The handful of forces - value, momentum, quality, size, low-vol - that drive most returns, built for India.
Capital Allocation & Sizing
How much to bet - Kelly, risk parity, volatility targeting and Black-Litterman, at the portfolio level.
Tail Risk: VaR, CVaR & Stress
Your worst normal day, and the days that break the model - VaR, expected shortfall and stress testing.
Alpha: Finding & Validating an Edge
The research process, the strategy families, and how to know an edge is real.
The Alpha Research Process
Turning a hunch into a tested edge - hypothesis, data, test, validation: the scientific method for trading.
Statistical Arbitrage
Market-neutral trading of relationships - pairs, baskets, and the cash-futures arb that runs on every Indian desk.
Cross-Sectional Momentum & Value
The two workhorses of systematic equity - rank the universe, go long the best, short the worst.
Event-Driven & Flow Strategies
Trading the calendar and the flows - earnings, index rebalancing, corporate actions and FII activity.
Market Making & Optimal Execution
The other side of the trade - quoting both sides, managing inventory, and slicing big orders to hide impact.
Rigor, Infrastructure & the Profession
Backtesting honestly, the tooling that supports research, and the path to a quant career.
Backtesting Without Fooling Yourself
The traps that turn a losing system into a beautiful backtest - look-ahead, survivorship, data snooping - and how to avoid them.
Machine Learning in Quant: Promise & Peril
Where machine learning genuinely helps a quant, where it quietly leaks the future, and how to use it safely.
Data & Research Infrastructure
The unglamorous backbone - tick vs bar data, point-in-time datasets, and the research-to-production pipeline.
Building a Quant Career in India
The firms, the desks, the interviews and the ethics - a practical map to actually becoming a working quant.
Capstone: A Full Quant Research Project
Everything together - a real edge taken from hypothesis to microstructure-aware data, model, portfolio, risk and an honest backtest.
For education only - not investment advice. Practise in analyze mode. 36 chapters, built on the OpenAlgo SDK.