9 ms·

An Intern’s Guide to Trading

369 points by 6502nerdface 5y ago

anm89 5y ago
Does anyone remember starfighter.io/stockfighter.io that Kalzumeus put up years ago? It was based around coding market making strategies based on the structures presented in this article. I still kick myself for not completing that when it was up. I'm always hoping that that will make it's way back up one day
- clusterhacks 5y ago
  I sure do - I finished all the stockfighter levels and loved the experience. There were some people who reverse-engineered stockfighter and had at least some of the code on github. You might try looking around for it. I sometimes look around for companies that use hiring challenges like that now but haven't had much luck. I think fly.io is using some type of challenge in their hiring process which makes sense given tptacek, patio11, and elptacek were the stockfighter cofounders.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    We do exclusively use work-sample hiring at Fly.io right now, though it looks a lot different from Starfighter (Microcorruption, Starfighter's predecessor, also wasn't the work sample we used at Matasano; both Starfighter and Microcorruption were about outreach). It'd be neat to come up with something Starfighter-y/Microcorruption-y that meshed with what we're doing at Fly.io. (I don't want to get too far off on a tangent here, though, because I also nerd out about market structure stuff and that's what the thread is about.)
  - distrill 5y ago
    I swear every 2 years tptacek has a new company with some obscure name. I guess fly isn't that obscure, maybe he's turning over a new leaf.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      I didn't start Fly.io! That's why it has a normal name.
      - idlewords 5y ago
        You didn't start the Fly.io It was always burning, since the world's been turning
- Bootvis 5y ago
  I think the ending was somewhat underwhelming but I sure had fun tinkering with C++. I know of a competition putting where students against each other. Competing with others seems more fun.
- WA 5y ago
  Why was stockfighter never open sourced? I played it, never finished it unfortunately.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    We were all super busy after we moved on from the business.
- catern 5y ago
  I loved Stockfighter. I played through it as preparation for starting my first job out of college, at an HFT. No comment on whether it was good preparation. :)
  - anm89 5y ago
    My assumption would be from a little perspective of it being good HFT job training that it probably isn't but that it's still probably a very valuable learning experience just in terms of getting your head in that domain.
- simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  I do, I do. The idea was really intriguing. Unfortunately the company didn't last long.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  Have a link?
AudienceFakeout 5y ago
>Access Denied >You don't have permission to access "http://www.nasdaq.com/articles/an-interns-guide-to-trading-2021-07-01 http://www.nasdaq.com/articles/an-interns-guide-to-trading-2..." on this server. >Reference #18.e0745968.1625685764.2ef97a3a Why do sites do this? Yes, I'm using Tor Browser to protect my privacy and stop big companies from tracking me. But I can just plug the URL into an archive service and read it from there.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Because the amount of abuse / scam / crap via Tor is incredible?
  - AudienceFakeout 5y ago
    I suspect it's just a passive aggressive way to punish people who value their privacy.
    - sigstoat 5y ago
      you are so beneath their notice that the idea they want to punish you is hilarious. you’re simply not their target audience. everything else is fantasy.
      - AudienceFakeout 5y ago
        Everybody's a target for data collection, it's the very basis of the comprehensive tracking and ads industry. No need to get so defensive - this isn't exactly a stunning revelation.
  - anoncake 5y ago
    This is a blog post.
    - slownews45 5y ago
      This is nasdaq.com Any major player with an actual security dept is going to have evaluated just blocking Tor - or they are wildly irresponsible. It's a relative low effort way to get a win on security with minimal harm to customers and particularly paying customers. Their sec ops team will be subscribed to things like DHS CISA alerts. Alert (AA20-183A) Defending Against Malicious Cyber Activity Originating from Tor They will evaluate the least effort approach and potentially follow it.
paveworld 5y ago
Not sure if this will help you but… https://web.archive.org/web/20210301042419/http://www.stockfighter.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210301042419/http://www.stockf...
anonu 5y ago
First impression from a quick perusal: looks really good and complete. Touches on topics not normally discussed in trading or r/wsb
- frakkingcylons 5y ago
  Indeed. This is a good resource to counter the nonsense that is spread about payment for order flow and market makers.
H8crilA 5y ago
This is great, but remember that if you're interested in investing, and not the markets themselves and trading, then this whole landscape is already so over-optimized to the point of being irrelevant. You could've achieved everything you wanted in investing even in the pre-computer era, like for example Buffett did. In fact you could've done everything you wanted already in the 1600s Amsterdam - see the book "Confusion of Confusions", a pretty great read. Read the 10-Ks, think about what people (will) need, what kind of margin pressures and competition dynamics will play out across the economy, read finance history books, play with pricing models. Focusing on market structure is kind of like focusing on network adapters and packet switching details, focusing on valuations/pricing/finance is like building deep ML models. Of course you need the damn networks to work, but guess what - some pretty clever people have already solved that for you.
- tptacek 5y ago
  I'm not so much interested in investing at all, but I'm fascinated by market structure details like these; it's like an Internet of money. It has extreme nerd value, regardless of its utility for profit seeking. :) Also, the details in this article are implicated in all sorts of HN threads, so it's useful to have a place to link to when people start debating how market makers work or things like that.
  - H8crilA 5y ago
    Yeah, it's a heavily optimized technical system, it simply has to attract nerds :)
    - sprusemoose 5y ago
      I love geeking the orderbook flow with a visualization tool (bookmap etc) you can see thousands of orders being placed, removed, eating other orders.. buying skirmishes, resistance lines... and to top it all off you can place an order and see it show up on the battlefield
      - 5y ago
bambataa 5y ago
This looks really interesting! I am relatively new to a tech role in finance and am still learning all the terminology. Does anyone know of a book that teaches markets from a historical, narrative perspective? I have found textbooks explaining the main asset classes and so on, but I think it would be really interesting to see an explanation of eg the repo market, invoice swaps etc as the evolution of solutions to problems.
- smabie 5y ago
  Not exactly what you are looking for but this is pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Speculation/dp/0452281806/ref=nodl_ https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Specula...
  - 9214 5y ago
    https://archive.org/details/deviltakehindmos00chan https://archive.org/details/deviltakehindmos00chan
- ra7 5y ago
  Economics of Money and Banking [1] is what you’re looking for, especially if you’re interested in a historical narrative of the monetary system. [1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking
- drdrey 5y ago
  I think "The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals" comes close to what you're asking.
- romanhn 5y ago
  Check out Larry Harris' Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. Might be somewhat dated by now, but I bet still very relevant.
  - ampdepolymerase 5y ago
porknubbins 5y ago
This is nice but trading crypto is the only way I’d ever been able to retain any of this stuff. You sit on an exchange without need for a broker and see your order go on the books or if its a market order how much liquidity it absorbs and how much price moves… its a 100x learning. I used to read books about market structure but all this stuff only helps after doing it.
- vmception 5y ago
  you can get direct market access in the equities markets too. its kind of pathetic that crypto still doesn't have brokers like the structure described in this article, even sadder when you've sat on enough sales calls to realize that there are a couple vendors selling/sold the entire custodial crypto exchange software to many goto exchanges and that software has brokerage, dark pool, and cross exchange smart order routing all built in that nobody ever turns on. Its okay, Uniswap and composibility leapfrogged it and now there is non-custodial cross exchange liquidity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

369 points by 6502nerdface 5y ago

Does anyone remember starfighter.io/stockfighter.io that Kalzumeus put up years ago? It was based around coding market making strategies based on the structures presented in this article. I still kick myself for not completing that when it was up. I'm always hoping that that will make it's way back up one day

clusterhacks 5y ago
I sure do - I finished all the stockfighter levels and loved the experience. There were some people who reverse-engineered stockfighter and had at least some of the code on github. You might try looking around for it. I sometimes look around for companies that use hiring challenges like that now but haven't had much luck. I think fly.io is using some type of challenge in their hiring process which makes sense given tptacek, patio11, and elptacek were the stockfighter cofounders.
- tptacek 5y ago
  We do exclusively use work-sample hiring at Fly.io right now, though it looks a lot different from Starfighter (Microcorruption, Starfighter's predecessor, also wasn't the work sample we used at Matasano; both Starfighter and Microcorruption were about outreach). It'd be neat to come up with something Starfighter-y/Microcorruption-y that meshed with what we're doing at Fly.io. (I don't want to get too far off on a tangent here, though, because I also nerd out about market structure stuff and that's what the thread is about.)
- distrill 5y ago
  I swear every 2 years tptacek has a new company with some obscure name. I guess fly isn't that obscure, maybe he's turning over a new leaf.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    I didn't start Fly.io! That's why it has a normal name.
    - idlewords 5y ago
      You didn't start the Fly.io It was always burning, since the world's been turning
Bootvis 5y ago
I think the ending was somewhat underwhelming but I sure had fun tinkering with C++. I know of a competition putting where students against each other. Competing with others seems more fun.
WA 5y ago
Why was stockfighter never open sourced? I played it, never finished it unfortunately.
- tptacek 5y ago
  We were all super busy after we moved on from the business.
catern 5y ago
I loved Stockfighter. I played through it as preparation for starting my first job out of college, at an HFT. No comment on whether it was good preparation. :)
- anm89 5y ago
  My assumption would be from a little perspective of it being good HFT job training that it probably isn't but that it's still probably a very valuable learning experience just in terms of getting your head in that domain.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
I do, I do. The idea was really intriguing. Unfortunately the company didn't last long.
moneywoes 5y ago
Have a link?

AudienceFakeout 5y ago

>Access Denied >You don't have permission to access "http://www.nasdaq.com/articles/an-interns-guide-to-trading-2021-07-01 http://www.nasdaq.com/articles/an-interns-guide-to-trading-2..." on this server. >Reference #18.e0745968.1625685764.2ef97a3a Why do sites do this? Yes, I'm using Tor Browser to protect my privacy and stop big companies from tracking me. But I can just plug the URL into an archive service and read it from there.

slownews45 5y ago
Because the amount of abuse / scam / crap via Tor is incredible?
- AudienceFakeout 5y ago
  I suspect it's just a passive aggressive way to punish people who value their privacy.
  - sigstoat 5y ago
    you are so beneath their notice that the idea they want to punish you is hilarious. you’re simply not their target audience. everything else is fantasy.
    - AudienceFakeout 5y ago
      Everybody's a target for data collection, it's the very basis of the comprehensive tracking and ads industry. No need to get so defensive - this isn't exactly a stunning revelation.
- anoncake 5y ago
  This is a blog post.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    This is nasdaq.com Any major player with an actual security dept is going to have evaluated just blocking Tor - or they are wildly irresponsible. It's a relative low effort way to get a win on security with minimal harm to customers and particularly paying customers. Their sec ops team will be subscribed to things like DHS CISA alerts. Alert (AA20-183A) Defending Against Malicious Cyber Activity Originating from Tor They will evaluate the least effort approach and potentially follow it.

paveworld 5y ago

Not sure if this will help you but… https://web.archive.org/web/20210301042419/http://www.stockfighter.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210301042419/http://www.stockf...

anonu 5y ago

First impression from a quick perusal: looks really good and complete. Touches on topics not normally discussed in trading or r/wsb

frakkingcylons 5y ago
Indeed. This is a good resource to counter the nonsense that is spread about payment for order flow and market makers.

H8crilA 5y ago

This is great, but remember that if you're interested in investing, and not the markets themselves and trading, then this whole landscape is already so over-optimized to the point of being irrelevant. You could've achieved everything you wanted in investing even in the pre-computer era, like for example Buffett did. In fact you could've done everything you wanted already in the 1600s Amsterdam - see the book "Confusion of Confusions", a pretty great read. Read the 10-Ks, think about what people (will) need, what kind of margin pressures and competition dynamics will play out across the economy, read finance history books, play with pricing models. Focusing on market structure is kind of like focusing on network adapters and packet switching details, focusing on valuations/pricing/finance is like building deep ML models. Of course you need the damn networks to work, but guess what - some pretty clever people have already solved that for you.

tptacek 5y ago
I'm not so much interested in investing at all, but I'm fascinated by market structure details like these; it's like an Internet of money. It has extreme nerd value, regardless of its utility for profit seeking. :) Also, the details in this article are implicated in all sorts of HN threads, so it's useful to have a place to link to when people start debating how market makers work or things like that.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  Yeah, it's a heavily optimized technical system, it simply has to attract nerds :)
  - sprusemoose 5y ago
    I love geeking the orderbook flow with a visualization tool (bookmap etc) you can see thousands of orders being placed, removed, eating other orders.. buying skirmishes, resistance lines... and to top it all off you can place an order and see it show up on the battlefield
    - 5y ago

bambataa 5y ago

This looks really interesting! I am relatively new to a tech role in finance and am still learning all the terminology. Does anyone know of a book that teaches markets from a historical, narrative perspective? I have found textbooks explaining the main asset classes and so on, but I think it would be really interesting to see an explanation of eg the repo market, invoice swaps etc as the evolution of solutions to problems.

smabie 5y ago
Not exactly what you are looking for but this is pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Speculation/dp/0452281806/ref=nodl_ https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Specula...
- 9214 5y ago
  https://archive.org/details/deviltakehindmos00chan https://archive.org/details/deviltakehindmos00chan
ra7 5y ago
Economics of Money and Banking [1] is what you’re looking for, especially if you’re interested in a historical narrative of the monetary system. [1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking
drdrey 5y ago
I think "The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals" comes close to what you're asking.
romanhn 5y ago
Check out Larry Harris' Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. Might be somewhat dated by now, but I bet still very relevant.
- ampdepolymerase 5y ago

porknubbins 5y ago

This is nice but trading crypto is the only way I’d ever been able to retain any of this stuff. You sit on an exchange without need for a broker and see your order go on the books or if its a market order how much liquidity it absorbs and how much price moves… its a 100x learning. I used to read books about market structure but all this stuff only helps after doing it.

vmception 5y ago
you can get direct market access in the equities markets too. its kind of pathetic that crypto still doesn't have brokers like the structure described in this article, even sadder when you've sat on enough sales calls to realize that there are a couple vendors selling/sold the entire custodial crypto exchange software to many goto exchanges and that software has brokerage, dark pool, and cross exchange smart order routing all built in that nobody ever turns on. Its okay, Uniswap and composibility leapfrogged it and now there is non-custodial cross exchange liquidity.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]