Case study: Algorithmic trading with Go
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&#x27;s also a tentative call for partnership if somebody is interested. And a call for chat if anyone has any interest in the topic.<p><i>(It&#x27;s also kind of off-topic, my apologies for that. To me it seems semi-related but would agree with mods&#x27; assessment if it doesn&#x27;t match mine.)</i><p>---<p>I recently &quot;broke up&quot; with some extremely toxic &quot;investors&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;t even post orders, another used Mutex-es for &quot;parallelism&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;re talking something small like $30k - $50k, not millions; for the work that was done, namely months of professional Rust programming work, that&#x27;s a -75% discount if we look at market rates).<p>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.<p>They insist &quot;if you just finish the demo we&#x27;ll give you money&quot; and used every gaslighting technique I knew about (and many I didn&#x27;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&#x27;t afford to travel and sue. Also they insist to get access to the source code but swear to everything that&#x27;s holy that they will not run away with it and never give me a penny. Which is exactly what I think would happen.<p>I had to draw the line at one point. To me it was red flags all around.<p>---<p>I made many concessions and I will not make another one until they do. I&#x27;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&#x27;t be used to provide the demo to these toxic investors -- I&#x27;ll use it to have a proven implementation that I can pitch to other people. These guys don&#x27;t deserve the time of day from me.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>If any business person wants to partner up -- give me a shout. Mail is in profile. I also wouldn&#x27;t refuse fellow techies (or anyone else really) stopping by and telling me how stupid and naive I was -- I&#x27;ll agree right away and say that they are right. Because truth is truth.<p>I admit I still can&#x27;t get over the fact how close I got but I can&#x27;t afford to count the stars while my livelihood is being endangered the longer I coast on savings. Dreams don&#x27;t pay bills. And some dreams need more than one person to be fulfilled.<p>Rant + story over. Thanks for reading if you stuck this far.