Open source market making arrives with Marketcetera

It can be tougher than getting the winning bid in at an eBay auction.

Traders who want to automate what they do and get the best price have long been saddled with proprietary systems like Bloomberg to run their algorithms.

No more. Now there’s Marketcetera. It’s a GPL Version 2.0 system, written mainly in Java, aimed at automating your trade operations so you can play with the big dogs.

Graham Miller is the CEO. “We built it out of a personal desire to see it happen. We got a small investment from ex-Susquehanna traders. We built out the platform and at the end of last summer decided we would take capital to extend it.

“Open source is traditionally a good way to develop new platforms,” he added. I like it when the words open source and traditionally sit in the same sentence. Shows someone is living fast.

“We have an Eclipse based front-end and a Java-based server back-end . We make use of Rubyscripting in several places – we integrate the JRuby scripting engine in the front-end. We also have a Rails application.”

Still, anything which can build Java code can build Marketcetera add-ons. “We have an integration story for .Net and other languages,” Miller adds.

Miller and CTO Toli Kuznets have been touting Marketcetera for months in open source communities like  Eclipse, RCP, QuickFIX  and QuantLib.

They also had the good taste to talk with our own Matt Asay, who called it cool and described its advantages for market makers.

I did a piece for Salon on day traders about a decade ago – it’s where the picture at the top of this post came from — so I know a little about these folks.

Day traders come in two types — gamblers and nerds. Gamblers invest like they’re sitting at a blackjack table in Las Vegas, nerds create a system and stick to it.

This will automate the nerds and give the gamblers that much more action.