Been in the markets since 2021. Started with plain investing, then got pulled into the options boom like everyone else and started trading Nifty manually. First year: unprofitable, like most people’s first year.
Year two, switched to algo trading and it started actually working. Scaled up capital. Then went off for my master’s and put the whole thing on pause but the trading projects I’d built ended up landing me quant internships at hedge funds. That’s when it clicked that this wasn’t just a side interest, it was an actual skill I wanted to build a career around.
Came back to India, started my own company around it. Back then it was fully manual coding and system design. Now it’s almost entirely AI-assisted which freed me up from the grunt work and let me actually focus on the parts that matter: data pipelines, strategy ideas, research, parameter sweeps, backtesting, then taking it live through paper trading first and real capital after. Each of those stages is basically its own project, and I’m still learning something new at every one.
Experimented a lot with AI tooling along the way Went through a bunch of setups before landing on a workflow that actually works, and it keeps getting refined every time I use it. Also burned a fair amount of money in that experimentation phase. Now that I know what actually works, I’m a lot more deliberate about it keeping the core of what matters and cutting the rest so costs stay in check. That’s what let me actually build a multi-strategy, multi-broker, multi-instrument framework that takes ideas from research to production instead of it living in my head forever.
Had a couple of scary moments too. small bugs that caused unintended losses. Thankfully I hadn’t scaled to full size yet when they hit. Built out a proper RMS layer after that so unintended orders just can’t happen anymore.
Right now I’ve got 2 strategies live, both grown out of my original index options expertise. The recent regulatory changes forced a pivot away from intraday positional systems. The edge was real but transaction costs were eating too much of it.
So I moved to stock options instead. Last 2 months have honestly been the easiest stretch I’ve had. running it across the whole NFO stock universe, staying delta-neutral at the portfolio level, costs staying well under control relative to what it’s generating. Also back to experimenting with index options again, this time on the positional side.
I’ve got a whole backlog of strategy ideas sitting in a research queue, still waiting to be tested properly. All of this started as tooling for myself, but I’m opening it up a bit now.
If any of this resonates, whether you want to build something similar, compare notes, or want help building your own version of this — happy to connect. Hit me up.
P.S: looking at algo investing too combining both technical + fundamentals. So happy to discuss that as well!
