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About Trading Reality
Trading Reality - Markets In Production — is an independent publication on the operational reality of systematic trading.
The pieces are written from the seat. I've spent years building and running systematic strategies, led an early HFT desk that made up 5% of Nasdaq OTC for several years, and ran a CFD brokerage. Tenures at a top-tier bank and a hedge fund. Real mileage across the spectrum. What I write here is what I've actually seen about how markets work, how systems get built, and where the conventional wisdom is wrong. The recurring concern is the distance between theory and practice. Both theory and practice are explored.
The publication is independent. No advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate revenue, no payment from any party covered. There is nothing to sell here and no one to please. The commitment to staying free and unaffiliated is structural, not aspirational — it’s what makes the publication worth reading.
Pieces appear irregularly with an attempt at cadence and a commitment to substance. The bar for publishing is whether the piece is worth your time. The body of work compounds across pieces; arguments build on earlier ones. Reading them is meant as an enriching journey, not a transaction.
Trading Reality is for systematic traders, quants, allocators, and anyone whose work touches the operational side of trading strategies. The writing aims to be intelligible to industry professionals while remaining accessible to anyone with genuine interest in how systematic trading actually works.
Adjacent to the publication: ordersim, an open-source execution simulator for replaying order-book data with full lifecycle inspection. It comes out of the same thinking. Open source, MIT licensed, lives at github.com/tradingexpert/ordersim.
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— Tibor S
