How Markets Really Work: The Mechanics of Prices, Liquidity, Risk, and Investor Behavior

Most investors learn what to buy. Far fewer learn how the market itself actually works. A market price is not a verdict on value. It is the visible result of an auction shaped by information, liquidity, expectations, leverage, institutional flows, and the constraints of the people trading. How Markets Really Work takes the investor behind the quotation screen. In clear, technically rigorous language, Paul-Adrian Rotaru explains how orders become prices, why liquidity carries a cost, what market makers really do, how passive and institutional flows affect markets, why good news can push prices down, how credit and central banks transmit stress, and why liquidity can disappear exactly when it is needed most. Inside, you will learn how to: - separate price from value and read the information contained in each; - understand auctions, order books, dealers, spreads, depth, slippage, and market impact; - interpret institutional rebalancing, index flows, buybacks, issuance, and corporate demand; - understand why markets move before the news-and why objectively good news can still produce a selloff; - recognize positioning, reflexivity, leverage, margin calls, fire sales, and liquidity spirals; - connect interest rates, credit, central banks, currencies, and global capital flows; - distinguish a crash trigger from the vulnerabilities that make the crash possible; >This is not an entry-level personal-finance book and it is not a trading-signal manual. It is the mechanics layer for investors who already understand portfolios and want a more accurate model of the system in which their capital operates. For readers of The Unhurried Investor and The Probability Investor, this book completes the three-book framework: temperament, judgment under uncertainty, and the machinery of markets.