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Ledgerworks Institute

Track 02 · Intermediate

Market Structure & Technical Analysis

How crypto markets are plumbed, how price forms, and where the common analytical claims break down.

  • 24 hours
  • 5 modules
  • 20 units
  • $340 or included in full access
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About this course

This course teaches the plumbing first: who quotes, who takes, where liquidity sits and what an order actually costs to execute. Only then does it look at chart-based methods, and it looks at them the way a practitioner does — construction, assumptions, and the conditions under which the method stops working.

It is not a trading course. There are no signals, no setups to copy and no strategy to follow. The unit on backtesting exists to make you harder to convince, including by yourself.

What you will be able to do

  • Describe how a limit order book forms price and where depth is illusory
  • Decompose execution cost into spread, impact and fees
  • Name the assumptions behind common indicators and when they fail
  • Identify survivorship, look-ahead and overfitting in a backtest

Syllabus

24 hours of contact material

01Venues, order books and liquidity4 units · 4 hr 20 min
  • Limit order books, matching and the anatomy of a fill
  • Market makers: what they are paid for and what they withdraw from
  • Centralised venues versus automated market makers
  • Where displayed depth overstates real liquidity
02Execution cost4 units · 5 hr
  • Spread, impact, slippage and fees as separate components
  • Order types and what each one concedes
  • Measuring your own execution against a benchmark
  • Exercise: cost a hypothetical order with the Institute calculator
03Technical methods: construction and assumptions4 units · 5 hr 20 min
  • Moving averages, oscillators and what smoothing discards
  • Volume, volatility and regime dependence
  • Chart patterns: how they are defined and why definitions matter
  • The base-rate problem in pattern claims
04Backtesting without fooling yourself4 units · 4 hr 40 min
  • Survivorship bias in crypto datasets specifically
  • Look-ahead: the four places it sneaks in
  • Overfitting, parameter sweeps and the multiple-comparisons problem
  • Exercise: break a backtest that looks excellent
05Risk arithmetic4 units · 4 hr 40 min
  • Position sizing as a constraint, not a prediction
  • Drawdown mathematics and the recovery asymmetry
  • Correlation under stress, and why it rises when it matters
  • Exercise: build a risk budget in the position-sizing worksheet

Who it is for

  • Analysts who read charts and want to know what the indicators assume
  • Engineers building execution or data tooling
  • Anyone who has been shown a backtest and could not interrogate it

Prerequisites

Blockchain Fundamentals, or the ability to read an order book and a block explorer already.

What is included

  • Video and written notes for every unit
  • Datasets used in the exercises
  • Access to the fee-and-slippage calculator and position-sizing worksheet
  • Certificate of completion

Assessment

Five exercise sets and a written assessment in which you critique a supplied backtest. Marked pass or resit.

Educational disclaimer

Ledgerworks Institute provides educational content and learning tools only. Nothing on this platform constitutes financial advice, an investment recommendation, or a guarantee of any outcome. Cryptocurrency and digital-asset markets carry substantial risk, including the total loss of capital. Conduct your own research and consult a qualified, licensed professional before making any financial decision.

Read the full disclaimer