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5:00What a Stock Exchange Actually Is
There is no trading floor full of shouting men. A modern stock exchange is a sorted list and a piece of software that pairs the top of one column with the top of another, thousands of times a second.
A stock exchange is not a building or a price ticker. At its core it is an order book plus a matching engine. The order book is two sorted queues: everyone who wants to *buy* a share (the bids) and everyone who wants to *sell* it (the asks, or offers). The matching engine is the software that pairs them. That is the whole machine, and almost everything else, the price you see on a screen, the spread you pay, the "market", is an *output* of it.
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