Options for Building a Simulated Stock Exchange for Strategy Testing

Summary

The document asks about open-source software for building a simulated stock exchange on a development server, with the goal of experimenting with trading strategies. Responses name three exchange or order-book projects and mention a small custom exchange simulator that one respondent used to test market-making strategies. The discussion also suggests using a broker’s paper-trading platform as an alternative way to interact with live market data through simulated orders.

The material is a brief list of leads rather than a technical comparison: it gives no details on matching rules, supported order types, latency, installation, or project maintenance. Paper trading can help exercise a strategy against a live market feed, but the response’s confidence claim is not supported by evidence in the document; simulation cannot establish that live performance will match. Readers would need to assess whether a simulator’s market mechanics fit their testing objective.

Key ideas

• Several open-source exchange or order-book projects are suggested as starting points.
• A small custom simulator is described as a tool for testing market-making strategies.
• Broker paper trading offers a way to practice with simulated orders and market data.
• The document does not compare simulator features or establish that paper-trading results predict live performance.

Tags

# Stock Exchange Software


# Stock Exchange Software












For weekends project, I would like to setup a "simulated" stock exchange on my dev server (windows/linux), ie. running my own NYSE server ?

what options do I have, open source wise (can be c# or java or else)

## Answer by madilyn (score 1, accepted)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/27891

You can try the following:

- Rex by Ben Wu

- Liquibook by Object Computing

- JessX by Ecole Centrale de Lille

## Answer by FX_NINJA (score 1)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/27887

hmmm, I mad something like this to test market making strategies. I have my code released, if you are interested however the project was made in a day and a half so you may want to improve on it. Here is a video I made to demonstrate it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka7rSQ2OWIw It links to the source.

## Answer by Brian O'Donnell (score 0)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/27883

You will be looking at an awful lot of work! You won't have enough weekends to finish it.

I suggest you open an Interactive Brokers account and use their Trade Workstation (TWS) platform in simulation mode (AKA paper trading). It uses the real market and allows you to trade it with $4M of fake money. I have used it for years to test and validate trading algorithms. If a strategy works out in paper trading mode you can feel confident it will work well on the real market.

For more information see https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/software/am/am/manageaccount/papertradingaccount.htm

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This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.