I'm sure that's one consideration, but there are a lot of other compelling reasons. It's fun, it's relatively accessible, it's easy to scale difficulty and it's

I'm sure that's one consideration, but there are a lot of other compelling reasons. It's fun, it's relatively accessible, it's easy to scale difficulty and it's easy to add competition. Performance is directly quantifiable along multiple axes and they can release multiplayer scenarios in the future. I can't think of many options with all of these properties that also require the particular technical skills they're looking for. It feels like doing a market simulation reasonably well is actually easier than their other track (a security CTF). One particularly nice aspect is how many skills an exchange simulator can test. You have low-level programming and optimization, interesting algorithmic problems and high-level data analysis. That's applicable to a lot of jobs outside of finance. As a game, it's surprisingly open-ended. Personally, I'm glad they chose this. I actually wrote a market-making bot for a mock exchange as part of an internship. It was fun and a great learning experience and not just for finance. I'm glad somebody is bringing this experience to the public at large.