For six months now I have been working on an application to perform automated stock trading. The deadline for the last major hurdle prior to going live in the market, having it run against the clearing house's execution simulator, was originally set for the end March. Deadlines, as they are want to do, slipped and new problems reared their heads. Most recently I found myself with a major refactoring hurdle due to the invalidation of a number of earlier assumptions. Prior to today all runs against the clearing house's simulator crashed and burned in a matter of seconds. finally this morning I had a stretch of 12 minutes before an error. Later, after much fiddling I managed to keep it running for 18 minutes. After one further round of changes which left me feeling excited but guarded, I was able to run it for 32 minutes, right up to the closing bell.
I remain cautiously optimistic about tomorrow. I intend to hit the office bright and early and have everything in place for the opening bell. I expect that I will spend the better part of my time staring at the screen and reading log outputs. Assuming all goes well early tomorrow, and assuming the principals can finagle clearance from our backer, tomorrow may just turn out to be the day we open this thing up in the market.
I came into this whole affair ignorant in all aspects of financial markets. I am now at a point where, through trial and error and the guidance of Gordon Kummel, I know the markets at a technical level that I doubt your average broker has ever dreamt. I don't claim to know the first thing about the specifics of economics or finance. I don't know a bad stock from a sure thing, but I do know the difference between the bid-offer spread and the tick stream. I know on the order of how many times people sell Microsoft stock to each other in the course of the day. I know a Limit order from a Market order and the importance of ones position in the queue at the ECN. Its always a fun experience to begin to blossom in a new domain.
All in all it was a very good day today.
