Implement an orderbook
What this preview is
Implement an orderbook is a medium quant coding problem on language knowledge in Cpp / Python, asked at Quant.
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Topic
- Language Knowledge
- Discipline
- Quant development
- Languages
- Cpp / Python
What this orderbook implementation problem tests
This is a medium-difficulty coding problem common at quantitative trading firms. It requires you to build a core market microstructure component—an orderbook that matches buy and sell orders in real time. The problem tests your ability to combine multiple data structures and rules into a working system that handles both correctness and efficiency.
Solving it well means choosing the right data structures to support price-priority and time-priority matching, implementing partial fills and order cancellation, and reasoning clearly about edge cases like duplicate order IDs and non-crossing prices. You'll need to track bids and asks separately, manage quantity across multiple matches, and identify the aggressor (the order that arrives second and triggers the trade).
- Price-priority and FIFO ordering within price levels
- Partial fills and order lifecycle management
- Efficient lookup, insertion, and removal by order ID and price
- Symmetry between buy and sell matching logic
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