An IT Professional’s Path into Electronic and Algorithmic Trading
Summary
This interview traces Praveen Singh’s move from electronics and software work into electronic trading roles at investment banks in Japan. His experience spans client connectivity and trading platforms, including work on direct market access, high-frequency trading, and low-latency systems. Learning about client execution algorithms such as VWAP and percentage-of-volume methods led him to study how strategies are designed and evaluated.
His learning account highlights a practical progression: build programming skills, learn market microstructure and statistics, then work through a basic VWAP strategy, backtest it on historical data, calculate profit and loss, and adjust parameters. He says the course support helped him address gaps in Python and statistics, and that he later set up a small desk to trade cryptocurrencies using self-written algorithms hosted in the cloud. This is a personal account rather than a controlled evaluation of a strategy or course. It gives no audited trading results, and its claims about performance and career plans should not be treated as evidence of likely outcomes for other traders.
Key ideas
- Electronic trading platform work can motivate deeper study of the algorithms offered to clients.
- A VWAP strategy can be introduced by defining the method, backtesting historical data, and measuring profit and loss.
- Programming ability does not remove the need to learn statistics and market microstructure.
- The interview describes one trader’s experience and does not establish that others will achieve similar results.
Tags
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.