Markets are truly fascinating. However much you think you know, you don't know as much as you could. The whole idea of Stockfigher really resonated with my expe

Markets are truly fascinating. However much you think you know, you don't know as much as you could. The whole idea of Stockfigher really resonated with my experience over the last year and a half. Markets are incredibly complex. Around the time a large contract ended in Hong Kong, I was at a web development conference for new programmers getting out of a bootcamp-style program (8 weeks, program or die). They put me on a panel and asked me about what it was like to be a freelance web dev. At one point, a guy raises his hand and starts asking about equity deals. He asks what it would take to get someone like me to work on a startup with him, no cash. Now, the market's rough for that sort of thing if you want experience. I told this guy that he would just "have to find some bozo who believed in the idea so much, he'd be willing to give up salary in exchange for massive risk. Who's going to do that?" We laughed a bit and moved on. Well, I ate my hat: I'm that bozo. I was impressed with his knowledge, so I joined up with him and another expert he wrangled. The two of them had an impressive amount of cumulative experience not only in trading, but in writing financial systems. We filled in each others' knowledge gaps perfectly. They took the lead on the backend systems and I did the rest. Cue months of finance training, seemingly endless numbers of commits (over 5000 between just the frontend and API alone, and that's only half the system), and we quickly pushed out our first beta of BitMEX. It's our take on a derivatives exchange with a much more finance-slanted perspective than our peers. We did months of paper trading and went live November of last year (we're almost to our first birthday!). In that time, we've explored many of the very hard problems in finance (margin trading is incredibly complex), and many more in UX (in short: finance is hard, making it simple for users is even harder). And now we're trading nearly $10M/day and growing. What's so great about today is that there are so many markets out there you can play on, and so much code to learn from. If you try Stockfighter, I commend you. I'd like to offer our simulation to the community - we run it at https://testnet.bitmex.com https://testnet.bitmex.com, and a really simple market making bot at https://github.com/BitMEX/market-maker https://github.com/BitMEX/market-maker. In about 20 minutes you can be up and running market making on our Testnet and trying out your strategies. Yeah, it's not the most complex bot out there (and we forked it from an old MtGox bot). It pretty much does the minimum possible to quote both sides of a market. But it's a great building block for more complex strategies, and it has all the parts you need, including Websocket hookups. Come grab me on Freenode #bitmex-testnet if you want help with it. I hope some of you give Stockfighter or our Testnet a try. Finance is a rabbit hole, but it's worth learning about. (tl;dr: Moved to Hong Kong, met some finance pros, wrote a ton of code, and now am CTO of BitMEX, one of the top Bitcoin exchanges by volume. We have a simulation market, it's worth trying out)