Making a trading Gameboy: A pocket exchange and algo trading platform @QuestDb
Tancrede Collard of QuestDB has been tinkering with Raspberry Pi products with his child. Various projects ensued then a Raspberry Pi Pico powered display from Pimoroni came along.
It then occurred to me that a market-making game would be more interesting.
When market-making, you are quoting on both exchanges and over the counter, hedging in the underlying market and taking/managing risk. A large difference between market making and the previous game is that in market making, you are constantly quoting both sides, and other participants come and trade against you.
To manage your risk, you can trade in the underlying markets. For example, if you sell S&P 500 ETFs, you are short. To mitigate this risk, you can buy a hedge instrument (for example S&P500 futures) which are perfectly correlated to the ETF and therefore render yourself immune to market movements.
A custom PCB was made with the display, Pico, and eight buttons to control all the various actions. Software has been written in MicroPython. Various methods were employed to have the code work quickly and efficiently.
I am truly impressed by the Raspberry Pi Pico, and the micropython language. When I think microcontroller, I think toothbrush control or small RC remote. But seeing it run an exchange, orderbook, matching engine, and refreshing a display for a cost of around $8 is truly impressive.
They just released a new version with more cores, more memory, and other features, and I can’t wait to try it for other projects and to see what more skilled makers will make of it!
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