The market maker's playbook
How to trade the order book from the resting side. Place limit orders that wait instead of cross, quote both sides of a market, price and size your quotes, manage the leg that fills alone, and know when to step away.
Every trade on the order book has a side that pays and a side that is paid. The trader who crosses the spread pays a fee. The trader whose order was already resting is credited a rebate, and if they were resting on both sides of the market, they can also capture the spread between them. This page is about being that second trader, deliberately and well.
Read this first
Acepyr is pre-mainnet. The $ACEPYR that exists today is a testnet token, a symbolic point system. It carries no economic value, no USDC claim, and no revenue share. It cannot be bought and may never have any value. For anything money-related, How Acepyr's economics work is the single source of truth.
Quoting is a skill, not a yield
Nothing on this page is a promise that quoting adds to your balance. A quoter who prices badly, sizes too large or leaves quotes up through news loses $ACEPYR, and one-sided fills are the normal case on a thin book. What follows is how to make those outcomes less likely, not a way to make them impossible.
The mechanics this page builds on live in two places: Trading the order book for how orders, escrow and the queue work, and Market making for the rebate schedule and the pair. This page is the practice.
Why rest instead of cross
Take the same trade done two ways: buy 100 YES shares on a market quoted $0.49 bid, $0.51 ask, and later sell them.
| Crossing both times | Resting both times | |
|---|---|---|
| You buy at | $0.51, the ask | $0.49, your bid |
| You sell at | $0.49, the bid | $0.51, your ask |
| Spread | Pay 2 cents a share | Capture 2 cents a share |
| Fee at each fill | Charged about 0.80% | Credited about 0.50% |
| Result on 100 shares, with no price move | About −2.80 $ACEPYR | About +2.50 $ACEPYR |
The gap between those two outcomes is more than 5 $ACEPYR on a position of about 50, before the market has done anything at all. The crosser gets something real for it: certainty of being filled, right now. The rester gives that up and is paid for waiting.
That is the whole trade-off in one sentence. Cross when being filled now matters more than the price. Rest when the price matters more than the timing.
Placing a limit order that rests
A limit order only earns the resting side's treatment if it actually rests. That takes a few habits.
Price inside the spread, not through it
Before you place anything, read the top of the ladder: the best bid and the best ask.
| You place | It rests if | It crosses (and you pay the fee) if |
|---|---|---|
| A buy of YES | Your price is below the best YES ask | Your price is at or above the best YES ask |
| A buy of NO | Your price is below the best NO ask | Your price is at or above the best NO ask |
Prices are whole cents from $0.01 to $0.99, so on a market quoted $0.49 / $0.51 the only price that improves the bid without crossing is $0.50. On a one-cent spread there is no room inside it at all: you either join the best bid or you cross.
There is no post-only option. Nothing stops an order that was meant to rest from crossing if you priced it through the other side, so the check above is yours to make, every time. The book moves while you type: if the ask drops to your price before you submit, your order crosses.
Remember the merged ladder
The ladder shows NO orders folded into the YES frame. A buy of NO at $0.45 appears as a YES ask at $0.55. So a book showing "$0.49 bid / $0.51 ask" may be made entirely of buyers, and buying NO at $0.49 is the same as offering YES at $0.51. Reading a book that shows both sides at once covers it in full.
Know where you stand in the queue
At one price, the oldest order fills first.
- Improving the best price by one cent puts you at the front of a brand-new level. You fill first, at a slightly worse price for you.
- Joining the best price puts you at the back of the existing queue there. You keep the better price and wait behind everyone already resting.
- Cancelling and re-placing sends you to the back of whatever level you land on. There is no amend. Re-quote because the market moved, not because you are impatient.
Cancelling is free and is not rate limited, but it is one order at a time: there is no cancel-all button. Keep the number of orders you rest on one market to what you can pull quickly.
Give every quote an expiry
An order that rests until you cancel it is still there when you have stopped watching the market. Setting an expiry on a quote means it disappears on its own when the time runs out, and its escrow comes back with it. A useful default: never let a quote outlive your attention.
The expiry menu is scaled to the market's length: minutes on an hour-long market, hours on a long one.
Budget for the lock
A resting buy escrows its price times its size, plus 5% headroom for a possible fee. Two legs of 100 shares at $0.49 lock about 103 $ACEPYR until they fill, expire or are cancelled. Plan your quotes against your free balance, not your total balance.
Your first two-sided quote
Here is one complete cycle on a market quoted $0.48 bid, $0.52 ask, with a mid of $0.50.
Form your own fair value first
The mid is somebody else's opinion. Before quoting, decide what you think the market is worth. Say you agree it is a coin flip: fair value $0.50.
Quote one cent either side of it
Rest a buy of YES at $0.49 and a buy of NO at $0.49. On the ladder that reads as a new best bid of $0.49 and a new best ask of $0.51. You are now the tightest quote on the book, on both sides.
Both legs fill
Someone sells YES into your bid, and later someone buys YES at your offer. You hold 100 YES and 100 NO, a complete set of pairs. They cost you $0.98 each and redeem for exactly $1.00, whichever way the market resolves.
Add up the cycle
Spread captured: 100 × $0.02 = 2.00 $ACEPYR. Rebate credited on each leg, about 0.50% of 49: about 0.25 each, 0.49 for the two. About 2.49 in all, on roughly 103 locked while the quotes rested.
That is the cycle working as intended. Most of the skill in market making is about what happens when it does not.
The leg that fills alone
The leg that fills first is usually the leg the market moved through. If your YES bid at $0.49 is filled, the likeliest reason is that someone was selling YES, and if they knew something, the price is now lower than when you quoted. You are long YES at $0.49 in a market that may now be worth $0.45, and your NO bid sits far from where anyone will reach it.
This is called adverse selection, and it is the main cost of quoting. You have three ways out, and it pays to decide which one you prefer before the fill, not after.
| Choice | What you do | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Complete the pair | Raise your NO bid toward the market until it fills | The spread you had, and possibly more. A NO fill at $0.51 makes the pair cost $1.00: no spread left, only the rebates. Above that, the pair costs more than it redeems for. |
| Exit the position | Sell the YES shares | Crossing to sell now pays the fee and takes the worse price. Resting a sell recovers more and may not fill. |
| Hold it | Keep the YES shares as a position | Nothing now. You are making a directional bet at the price you quoted, so only do it on a market where you would have bought anyway. |
Skew, do not chase. When one side fills, move both quotes in the direction that discourages more of the same fill: lower your bid on the side you now hold, and make the other side slightly more attractive. That way the next fill is more likely to be the one that completes your pairs.
Set an inventory limit before you start
Decide the most unpaired shares you are willing to hold on one market, for example one level's worth, and stop adding to that side when you reach it. A quoter with no limit ends up holding a large directional position they never meant to take, acquired at exactly the moments the market was moving against them.
Quoting a Live window
Live markets are order-book markets: hour-long windows on BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, BNB, HYPE, NVDA and SPCX, and six-hour windows on TSLA, SPY, META and PLTR. Each asks whether the price will finish the window above where it started. The two sides are called Up and Down instead of YES and NO, and everything on this page applies to them the same way. Three things set them apart from a slow market.
Fair value is arithmetic, and it moves every second. At the open, with the price sitting on the starting level, Up is worth about $0.50. As the price moves away from that level, and as the window runs down, Up swings toward $1.00 or $0.00, and the closer the close, the further each move of the price carries it. A quote that was fair a minute ago can be several cents wrong now. Your fair value comes from watching the live price against the starting level, not from the book.
A quote that stands still fills on the losing side. Suppose you rest a buy of Up at $0.49 and a buy of Down at $0.49, and the price then jumps so that Up is worth $0.70. Nobody sells Up to you at $0.49. Plenty of traders buy Up at $0.51 by filling your Down bid, which leaves you holding Down at $0.49 when it is worth about $0.30. On a fast window, the side of a stale quote that fills is almost always the side that just lost value.
The venue quotes too. Every Live window carries a two-sided ladder that the venue rests before the window opens and re-prices as the price moves. Your orders queue alongside it by the ordinary rules: a better price fills first, and at the same price the older order fills first. Quoting inside that ladder puts you first in line, which is also first in line for whoever reacts to a price jump before you do.
What follows from those three:
- Quote wider than you would on a slow market, and wider again as the close approaches.
- Use the shortest expiry your attention allows. An hour-long window offers 1, 5, 15 or 30 minutes.
- Re-quote when the price moves, or pull your quotes. A Live quote you are not watching is a quote someone else will choose to fill.
- Prefer early in a six-hour window to late in an hour-long one. Fair value moves least per tick of the price when there is plenty of time left, and most in the final minutes.
- The Provide Liquidity ladder does not follow the price. It is placed around the mid at that moment and stays where it was put.
Where to quote, and where not to
Width
| Quote | You get | You risk |
|---|---|---|
| Tight, one cent off your fair value | More fills, more rebate | More one-sided fills, and less spread per pair to absorb them |
| Wide, three to five cents off | Fewer fills, more spread per pair | Being bypassed by tighter quoters, and sitting unfilled |
Go wider when the market is moving fast, when you are less sure of your fair value, or when an event is coming. Tighten up when the price has been stable and flow is arriving from both sides.
The middle and the tails
The rebate is largest at even money and shrinks toward both ends of the range: about 0.50% at $0.50, about 0.18% at $0.10 or $0.90, about 0.10% at $0.05 or $0.95. The full schedule is on the market making page.
The tails carry a second trap. A one-cent spread is one cent everywhere, but a one-sided fill is not equally bad everywhere. A YES bid filled at $0.95 that goes the wrong way loses $0.95 a share to gain at most $0.05 if it goes right. Quote the tails small, or leave them to someone who has a firm view on that outcome.
Markets with flow
The rebate on a market is paid out of the fees that market's crossing traders have already paid, and a market can never credit more than it has collected. A quiet market with no crossing flow has nothing to credit you with however tight your quotes are. Quote where people are trading.
When to step away
Pull your quotes, or let them expire, when:
- A scheduled event is close. A data release, a game, an announcement. Anyone who learns the answer first will trade against whatever you left resting.
- The market is near its close. As the outcome firms up, the people still trading tend to know more than the quote they are trading against.
- The price is moving and you are not watching. A stale quote is a free option for the first person to notice it.
- You are already at your inventory limit on that side.
The Provide Liquidity ladder
The order menu on a market page has a Provide Liquidity option that places a two-sided ladder of resting buy orders in one action. The ladder orders behave like any other order: they queue, fill, expire and cancel normally, and they are credited the same rebate. The settings, and a sensible place to start with each:
| Setting | Range | A careful first choice |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | The $ACEPYR the ladder may lock | An amount you would be comfortable holding as a one-sided position |
| Distance from the mid | 1 to 25 cents | 2 to 3 cents, wider on a market that is moving |
| Price levels | 1 to 5 | 2 or 3, so a move fills you at improving prices rather than all at once |
| How long the quotes last | The expiry menu for that market's length | The shortest choice that covers the time you will be watching |
The ladder centres on the market's current mid, and each further level sits one cent wider than the last. If you disagree with the mid, place your quotes by hand around your own fair value instead.
The ladder splits your budget by $ACEPYR, not by shares
Every order in the ladder gets an equal slice of the budget, so the cheaper side buys more shares. At a mid of $0.30, one level one cent off the mid and a budget of 60, each side's slice of 30 buys 103 YES at $0.29 but only 43 NO at $0.69. If both fill, 43 become complete pairs and the other 60 YES shares are a directional position. The further the mid is from $0.50, the larger that leftover. To quote matched pairs on a lopsided market, place the two sides by hand with the same number of shares.
A routine
Before you quote
Pick a market with crossing flow and no event due during your quotes' lifetime. Form a fair value. Decide your budget, your width, and your inventory limit.
While your quotes rest
Check the book at intervals shorter than your quotes' expiry. When one side fills, skew. When the market moves through your fair value, decide whether your fair value was wrong before you re-quote.
After
Look at what happened. How many of your fills became complete pairs, and how many were left one-sided? What did the pairs cost on average? Did your one-sided positions win or lose? Those three numbers tell you whether to quote tighter, wider, or somewhere else next time.
Mistakes that drain a quoter's balance
| Mistake | What happens | Instead |
|---|---|---|
| Quoting at the mid without a view | You inherit everyone else's mistakes at their price | Form a fair value, then quote around it |
| Pricing through the spread | Your "maker" order crosses and pays the fee | Read the best bid and ask before every order |
| One big order instead of a ladder | One fill takes your whole budget at one price | Split size across two or three levels |
| No expiry | Quotes rest through events you were not watching | Set an expiry shorter than your attention |
| Chasing the completing leg | You pay more than $1.00 for a pair | Decide your exit choice before the fill |
| Re-quoting on every tick | You keep losing queue position | Re-quote when the market moves, not before |
| Quoting a dead market | No fills, and no rebate to fund one if you did | Quote where people are trading |
| Large size in the tails | One wrong fill costs many fills' worth of spread | Keep tail quotes small |
The rules of the venue
- Quoting is done by hand. The Terms of Service prohibit bots, scripts and automated access. There is no trading API and no programmatic order entry.
- Placing is rate limited at sixty orders a minute. Cancelling is not.
- There is no market maker programme. No designated quoter status and no special scoring for quoting. The rebate and the spread are the whole of it, and both are described on Market making.
- Filled quotes count as trading volume. The weekly tournament pool is shared by trading volume, and a leg of yours that fills counts toward it exactly as a crossing trade does. An order that rests and never fills counts for nothing.
- The schedule can change. The fee and rebate rates are the ones in force now, not a commitment. Build habits that work across rates, not a strategy that only works at one.
FAQ
Related
- Trading the order book — order types, escrow, queue position and the merged ladder
- Market making — the rebate schedule, the cap that funds it, and the pair
- Overview — how a market works, and which markets run on the order book
- How Acepyr's economics work — the single source of truth on anything money-related
Questions
Email auriza@acepyr.com.