on learning something completely new while doing it

the thing about entering a field you know nothing about is that you have no idea which parts are hard until you hit them

when someone sent me the imc prosperity 4 link i knew vaguely what algorithmic trading was. prices, models, signals — i had the vocabulary at a surface level. what i didn't have was any understanding of how order books actually work, why market makers exist and what the economics of their position is, how options pricing is derived from first principles, or what volatility actually means as a mathematical object rather than just "uncertainty"

so the first few days were a lot of reading. bergomi's book on volatility has this quality where each chapter assumes you've really understood the previous one and if you haven't you'll get through the chapter fine and then realize at the end that you missed something. hull on options is clearer but also longer. i read them in parallel which isn't how you're supposed to read technical books but time was a constraint

what i found is that the concepts are interconnected in ways that aren't obvious from outside. understanding why implied volatility is not the same as realized volatility requires understanding what an option actually is, which requires understanding why the payoff structure creates a specific kind of risk exposure, which requires understanding how traders hedge that exposure, which changes how you think about what implied volatility is measuring in the first place. you can't really learn any of these things in isolation

the competition structure forced a deadline on the learning that was useful in a way i didn't expect. you couldn't wait until you fully understood something before testing it — you'd run out of competition days. so you'd have a partial understanding of how GARCH volatility forecasting works, use it to build something, watch the results, and update your understanding based on what actually happened. that feedback loop, compressed into days rather than a semester, taught me a lot more than reading the whole textbook would have

the part i'm still thinking about: we came in the top 1% globally. 22,000 teams, most of them with real experience in this domain. i don't think that's because i'm particularly talented at finance — i'm not, relative to people who've spent years in it. i think it's because entering with no background meant i had no habits to unlearn and no "obviously you do it this way" assumptions baked in, so i read everything as new information rather than filtering it through what i already thought i knew

that probably has a use beyond this specific context

the corollary is that doing this is uncomfortable in a way that's hard to sit with. not knowing things, especially in a competitive context where other people do know them, is unpleasant. there's a pull toward the areas where you're already competent because competence feels better than confusion. i think knowing that pull is there and doing the hard thing anyway is more learnable than people think it is