Really funny coincidence that I am seeing Interactive Brokers mentioned in this good article. Story + rant time, feel free to skip if you are not interested how one guy gambled and lost. It's also a tentative call for partnership if somebody is interested. And a call for chat if anyone has any interest in the topic.
(It's also kind of off-topic, my apologies for that. To me it seems semi-related but would agree with mods' assessment if it doesn't match mine.)
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I recently "broke up" with some extremely toxic "investors" that wanted me to do a fully parallel trading demo -- meaning it receives ticks for N instruments (I successfully got to little less than 300) and trades with each of them depending on strategy. All in real-time.
I got very far but the open-source libraries for Interactive Brokers are quite low quality in general and it was very hard and slow to progress (one of them couldn't even post orders, another used Mutex-es for "parallelism" which was of course not parallel at all, another one seemed to work well but only worked on servers of older versions compared to those I have access to, etc). I also had to gather code from separate places and assemble my own Frankenstein as I went along.
Eventually I muscled through but by that time I have drained all my savings, my tax fund and even got a new loan. And the liaison + the investors of course refused to acknowledge the demo was basically 90% done (couldn't do full parallel trading due to defects of the IBKR libraries I have used and I used like 5 of them, and was in the process of repairing 2 of them to unlock the said full parallelism). They refused to send a small pre-funding wire (we're talking something small like $30k - $50k, not millions; for the work that was done, namely months of professional Rust programming work, that's a -75% discount if we look at market rates).
They had all the proof and paper trail they needed to see that I was very close but I had to stop because I was literally about to be unable to pay rent and bills. They still did not concede. Obviously I picked a job and dumped them but I still have some regrets because the door is technically still open (they have not cut my access to the IB Gateway servers that they own), but other factors like now-ruined health are seriously getting in the way as well. Not to mention completely shattered trust.
They insist "if you just finish the demo we'll give you money" and used every gaslighting technique I knew about (and many I didn't know about, so I learned a lot about gaslighting from them, lol) to try and coerce me to keep working for free with zero guarantees of funding -- but I no longer trust such rich investors to fulfill a promise without a binding and legally enforceable contract; I am in Eastern Europe, they are in the USA, even if they sign contract and violate it I practically cannot do anything to them i.e. I can't afford to travel and sue. Also they insist to get access to the source code but swear to everything that's holy that they will not run away with it and never give me a penny. Which is exactly what I think would happen.
I had to draw the line at one point. To me it was red flags all around.
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I made many concessions and I will not make another one until they do. I'll be finding a new job soon again since the previous contract was agreed upon to be for several months, I helped a team accelerate bootstrapping a business-critical product (and we did that successfully). And then maybe, just maybe, after I settle a bit, I might work an hour or two on this again during some evenings. Maybe. And that won't be used to provide the demo to these toxic investors -- I'll use it to have a proven implementation that I can pitch to other people. These guys don't deserve the time of day from me.
I have quite a lot of good code (mostly Rust, but also some Elixir and Golang -- I experimented a lot) that interfaces with Interactive Brokers and I have many building blocks of a good trading bot framework. That kind of creative and thorough work needs funding and peace of mind to be finished properly, of course. And I can't afford to invest so much energy on this without a stable income so I am shifting focus to that for however long it might take for me to feel comfortable to invest time and energy in this again.
If any business person wants to partner up -- give me a shout. Mail is in profile. I also wouldn't refuse fellow techies (or anyone else really) stopping by and telling me how stupid and naive I was -- I'll agree right away and say that they are right. Because truth is truth.
I admit I still can't get over the fact how close I got but I can't afford to count the stars while my livelihood is being endangered the longer I coast on savings. Dreams don't pay bills. And some dreams need more than one person to be fulfilled.
Rant + story over. Thanks for reading if you stuck this far.
How did you get into this kind of shady arrangement? This is not how it works if you go to a reputable prop firm. Also sometimes they already have infra setup for you to build on.
A liaison of these "investors" found me somehow. I can only hypothesize it was through HN.
And yes I was tempted. I also don't have any trading credentials. I'm simply a senior programmer with an eye for details who always wanted to try his hand at algorithmic trading. So yeah, I got hooked. :(
It all boils down to what do you know in terms of languages and how good a quality of libraries you can find.
IBKR is kind of an elitistic VIP club, not just anyone can gain access. Thus you won't find a lot of libraries. There's a good number of them but the quality is not great.
I always wanted to learn OCaml by the way but in my current life and career phase I still can't justify the time and energy expenditure, and I know it will be significant.
(It's also kind of off-topic, my apologies for that. To me it seems semi-related but would agree with mods' assessment if it doesn't match mine.)
---
I recently "broke up" with some extremely toxic "investors" that wanted me to do a fully parallel trading demo -- meaning it receives ticks for N instruments (I successfully got to little less than 300) and trades with each of them depending on strategy. All in real-time.
I got very far but the open-source libraries for Interactive Brokers are quite low quality in general and it was very hard and slow to progress (one of them couldn't even post orders, another used Mutex-es for "parallelism" which was of course not parallel at all, another one seemed to work well but only worked on servers of older versions compared to those I have access to, etc). I also had to gather code from separate places and assemble my own Frankenstein as I went along.
Eventually I muscled through but by that time I have drained all my savings, my tax fund and even got a new loan. And the liaison + the investors of course refused to acknowledge the demo was basically 90% done (couldn't do full parallel trading due to defects of the IBKR libraries I have used and I used like 5 of them, and was in the process of repairing 2 of them to unlock the said full parallelism). They refused to send a small pre-funding wire (we're talking something small like $30k - $50k, not millions; for the work that was done, namely months of professional Rust programming work, that's a -75% discount if we look at market rates).
They had all the proof and paper trail they needed to see that I was very close but I had to stop because I was literally about to be unable to pay rent and bills. They still did not concede. Obviously I picked a job and dumped them but I still have some regrets because the door is technically still open (they have not cut my access to the IB Gateway servers that they own), but other factors like now-ruined health are seriously getting in the way as well. Not to mention completely shattered trust.
They insist "if you just finish the demo we'll give you money" and used every gaslighting technique I knew about (and many I didn't know about, so I learned a lot about gaslighting from them, lol) to try and coerce me to keep working for free with zero guarantees of funding -- but I no longer trust such rich investors to fulfill a promise without a binding and legally enforceable contract; I am in Eastern Europe, they are in the USA, even if they sign contract and violate it I practically cannot do anything to them i.e. I can't afford to travel and sue. Also they insist to get access to the source code but swear to everything that's holy that they will not run away with it and never give me a penny. Which is exactly what I think would happen.
I had to draw the line at one point. To me it was red flags all around.
---
I made many concessions and I will not make another one until they do. I'll be finding a new job soon again since the previous contract was agreed upon to be for several months, I helped a team accelerate bootstrapping a business-critical product (and we did that successfully). And then maybe, just maybe, after I settle a bit, I might work an hour or two on this again during some evenings. Maybe. And that won't be used to provide the demo to these toxic investors -- I'll use it to have a proven implementation that I can pitch to other people. These guys don't deserve the time of day from me.
I have quite a lot of good code (mostly Rust, but also some Elixir and Golang -- I experimented a lot) that interfaces with Interactive Brokers and I have many building blocks of a good trading bot framework. That kind of creative and thorough work needs funding and peace of mind to be finished properly, of course. And I can't afford to invest so much energy on this without a stable income so I am shifting focus to that for however long it might take for me to feel comfortable to invest time and energy in this again.
If any business person wants to partner up -- give me a shout. Mail is in profile. I also wouldn't refuse fellow techies (or anyone else really) stopping by and telling me how stupid and naive I was -- I'll agree right away and say that they are right. Because truth is truth.
I admit I still can't get over the fact how close I got but I can't afford to count the stars while my livelihood is being endangered the longer I coast on savings. Dreams don't pay bills. And some dreams need more than one person to be fulfilled.
Rant + story over. Thanks for reading if you stuck this far.