Personal software / Quantitative analysis
A private, end-to-end platform that plugs into a live brokerage, pulls market data, and runs a whole suite of analytical engines to model risk, income, and portfolio health. Every night it rebuilds itself and republishes a set of interactive dashboards, unattended; through the trading session, a live layer keeps the screens current in real time. It is strictly read-only: it analyzes and advises, and never places a trade.
Est. replacement cost
$2.5–4M
To rebuild it to the same level at Bay Area engineering rates.
Engineering effort
4–6 yrs
Person-years of senior / staff work. Up to ~10 to reach it from a blank page.
Put differently: a well-funded startup’s entire flagship product at its first major funding round is often this size. This one was built solo, on the side, while running against a real live account.
Lines of code are a rough ruler, but they give a feel for scale. This platform sits in genuinely serious company: past the first version of Photoshop, past the core of SQLite, within sight of the software that flew the Space Shuttle.
Figures are widely-cited approximations; sources count lines differently. Order-of-magnitude intuition, not a leaderboard. The Shuttle bar ends at the edge (~420k); the PostgreSQL bar (~1.4M) fades out because it keeps going for three more chart-widths.
Real-time market data flows in through a single hardened data layer that every tool shares.
The whole system refreshes, recomputes, and republishes on a schedule, with no one at the keyboard.
Each a focused tool, from scenario modeling to income and risk planning, sharing common building blocks.
Results render as clean web dashboards and deploy straight to the cloud, viewable anywhere.
A regression suite guards the math, so a change in one place can’t quietly break another.
Every tool is read-only. It models, ranks, and recommends. It never executes an order.
The nightly engines answer the morning’s questions. Through the trading session, a second layer keeps the key screens alive: the same analytical code, fed by streaming data, republishing continuously. And because a live screen is read to make decisions under time pressure, this layer holds itself to a rule most software never states: it must prove it is current, and say so loudly when it is not.
Prices stream on persistent subscriptions. Between broker fetches, every option is repriced from its own greeks against the moving market, at zero data cost. The contracts that actually drive decisions get real quotes re-verified on a rotating schedule, and immediately on any significant move.
A live position feed watches every account. A fill in the trading platform re-scopes the affected position within seconds: alerts drop, coverage flips, and nothing needs a restart.
A new recommendation must persist through a confirmation window and survive a real-quote check before it replaces the old one. Every change that lands is journaled: timestamp, before, after, and the price that caused it.
Every page carries the moment its data was generated and ages it in the browser once a second. A frozen dashboard announces itself as a growing number instead of sitting there looking confident.
The status banner distinguishes conditions that normally look identical: current, running behind, busy but alive, and genuinely stopped. It never accuses a live process of being dead, and never lets a dead one look alive.
Every processing cycle is time-bounded, so heavy market-data work can never silently stall the display. Tabs left in the background for hours wake correctly and catch up within a second.
The cost and time estimates use standard software-sizing models together with fully-loaded Bay Area pay for the senior and staff engineers this kind of work requires. If anything, the line count understates the difficulty: there is almost no filler here, no framework scaffolding, no borrowed libraries, no interface padding, so each line carries more logic than a typical line of commercial software. On a difficulty-adjusted basis, the real replacement cost lands at the upper end of the range.