Aiming at the problem of high matching cost in the existing complex event matching processing methods， a complex event matching algorithm ReCEP was proposed， which uses event buffers （ordered event lists） for recursive traversal. Different from the existing method that uses automaton to match on the event stream， this method decomposes the constraints in the complex event query mode into different types， and then recursively verifies the different constraints on the ordered list. Firstly， according to the query mode， the related event instances were cached according to the event type. Secondly， the query filtering operation was performed to the event instances on the ordered list， and an algorithm based on recursive traversal was given to determine the initial event instance and obtain candidate sequence. Finally， the attribute constraints of the candidate sequence were further verified. Experimental testing and analysis results based on simulated stock transaction data show that compared with the current mainstream matching methods SASE and Siddhi， ReCEP algorithm can effectively reduce the processing time of query matching， has overall performance better than both of the two methods， and has the query matching efficiency improved by more than 8.64%. It can be seen that the proposed complex event matching method can effectively improve the efficiency of complex event processing.