Ctrl-C
Ctrl-V
Ctrl-Trade

I'm a hacker at heart, not a trader. I built my entire career around technology, and when I first tried to approach the markets, I did it the same unstructured way I approach my cybersecurity research.

In some way, trading is not that different from hacking. One aims to take advantage of market inefficiencies, the other to exploit software or system faults. The similarity resonated with me immediately.

I soon learned it's possible to find opportunities in the markets, but doing it consistently and profitably over time is much harder. The most reliable way, I realized, was to build a systematic approach — a trading system based on statistics rather than sentiment. In other words: a quantitative approach.

After looking at many instruments, I got hooked on options for plenty of reasons, but most importantly because they let you trade in any market condition with little to no friction, and have a tunable risk profile. I read through a lot of books, and found The Unlucky Investor's Guide to Options Trading by Julia Spina to be the ideal quantitative framework to build the software around — thanks to its focus on risk management, allocation, position sizing, and diversification.

I used it as a foundational layer of my software — a minimal-luck approach to investing professionally — and built on top of that an exploration framework to push the limits of known research and validate (or falsify!) any market thesis through data.

This is how ctrl-trade was born! I know, the name is a bit too geeky, but what do you expect from a hacker? Plus, look down at your keyboard — the ctrl key is right next to the option key... how can it be just a coincidence? :)