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About Trading Reality
Trading Reality — Markets in Production is written by Tibor S., a practitioner with years of experience building, running, and operating systematic trading strategies in real markets.
The pieces are written from the seat.
I have spent years building and running systematic strategies, led an early HFT desk that made up 5% of Nasdaq OTC for several years, ran a CFD brokerage, and held roles at a top-tier bank and a hedge fund. That work provided real mileage across the trading spectrum: systematic strategies, execution, market structure, liquidity, infrastructure, adverse selection, brokerage, and the operational realities that appear only when systems meet live markets.
What I write here comes from what I have actually seen about how markets work, how trading systems get built, where theory earns its keep, and where conventional wisdom breaks down.
The recurring concern is the distance between theory and practice.
Theory matters. Practice matters. But the most useful insights often appear in the space between them: where a model leaves the research environment, meets transaction costs, interacts with liquidity, competes with other participants, and becomes an actual position in a real market.
What Is Trading Reality?
Trading Reality — Markets in Production is an independent publication on systematic trading, execution, market microstructure, and the operational reality of trading systems in production.
Most writing about trading focuses on signals, setups, indicators, predictions, psychology, or portfolio construction. Trading Reality focuses on what happens after a signal is found: execution quality, market selection, liquidity, order flow, transaction costs, participant structure, infrastructure, and the gap between a clean backtest and a tradable system.
The publication is for systematic traders, quants, allocators, portfolio managers, execution specialists, market-structure researchers, trading-technology builders, and serious independent traders whose work touches the operational side of trading strategies.
The goal is to be intelligible to industry professionals while remaining accessible to anyone with a genuine interest in how systematic trading actually works.
Independence
Trading Reality is independent.
There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate revenue, no referral compensation, no pay-to-play coverage, and no payment from any party covered.
I don’t do this for bragging rights. It’s the operating model.
The publication is meant to earn trust by staying structurally unconflicted. The work is free to follow the argument wherever it leads, without biasing or optimizing for sponsors, advertisers, platforms, brokers, vendors, or promotional relationships.
Publishing Philosophy
Pieces appear with an attempt at cadence, but the commitment is to substance.
The bar for publishing is whether the piece is worth your time.
The body of work is meant to compound across essays. Arguments build on earlier arguments. Concepts recur, sharpen, and connect. Reading Trading Reality is meant to be an enriching journey through the practical mechanics of trading systems, not a transaction.
Related Project
Adjacent to the publication is ordersim, an open-source execution simulator for replaying order-book data with full lifecycle inspection.
It comes out of the same thinking behind Trading Reality: that execution, fills, order behavior, and market mechanics are not secondary details. They are central to whether a trading strategy can actually work in production.
ordersim is open source, MIT licensed, and available at:
github.com/tradingexpert/ordersim
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— Tibor S.
