It all started with the best of intentions
Doesn't it always. I soon descended into stark, raving madness.

I work for a large company. Huge company in fact. One group in my office has to time their weekly meeting so that people in India *and* America can join in as well.

We write financial software to do financially type things and someone came up with a great idea. "Let's put on a fake trading session based on Euro 2008 and let employees use our own software to buy or sell shares in teams and they can win or lose money based on the trades they make." Dangling the football based gambling carrot would in theory make us all understand the software we sell inside out.

But I didn't care about that. It was the chance to gamble on football but not in some primitive way down at the bookies. This was a proper trading simulation! It would be all, "Buy Germany, they never give up. Sell Portugual, prima donnas!" etc. Long before the trading was to start I was totally gripped by the romance of the combination of two of my great joys: football and capitalism.

But the thing was, I didn't have a clue about trading. I work on market risk which is all about analysing the results of trading once all the deals have been done. I thought to myself, I don't know how to use this software, I don't know what I'm doing. I'll get screwed over by these fancy arbitrageurs* with their automated deal placing programs. Well this is capitalism, I should stick to my strengths. Maybe I don't know anything about trading but I do know about market risk. I know, I'll write a small program. Nothing fancy, it'll just be able to enter some trades e.g. bought 100 shares in The Netherlands at 6.7 cents, and give me the possible payoffs for various outcomes.

But then it started. For every little bit of functionality I added to my program my eyes glazed over more and more. I could see myself running simulations based on past results (or as we call it in the business, historical value-at-risk). I could run random simulations based on probabilities of teams' strengths and weaknesses and the scheduled matches they were due to play (Monte-Carlo value-at-risk). I could add a positions sheet to take care of multiple trades in the same team and show my total exposure. I could generate best and worst case scenarios. I could knock up a shiny drag-and-drop GUI. I could...

...

And so I did

Screenshot of my stupid, over the top Euro 2008 program

I could picture all the money rolling in as I took sensible positions in all the teams based on my program minimising my total risk.

Unfortunately for me it was about halfway through the Euro 2008 tournament before I realised that not only was I losing money because of some shocking decisions (spending over £10 backing France. I mean, France for fuck's sake, they finished bottom of the group of death!) but I had wasted so many nights labouring over this pile of shite program. And it was useless. All it could do well was tell me exactly how much money I was losing inbetween trading sessions.

Thankfully the insanity faded as I realised how much time was wasted, and ultimately, time is most important resource you can own. In a flash of inspiration I but the keyboard down and stopped trying to add that last bit of killer functionality that was going to turn it around and make me all my money back. I did a quick calculation that closing all my positions would leave me guaranteed in the red but only by a meagre £20.

After doing so I finally got my life back, I could relax and watch the football simply for the sake of it.

So in an attempt to show what a crazy, get-rick-quick opportunist can do with a compiler and some caffeine, ladies and gentleman b3tans, I give you my Euro 2008 program**.

You will find it comes with no documentation nor user manual but that's ok as it doesn't actually fucking do anything. However, as with all free programs, if you do download and find it entertains in anyway please consider contributing a click to the general upkeep of the poor mental b3tan responsible.

* - an arbitrageur is someone who exploits internal contradictions in the pricing of financial instruments to place multiple trades which will make a guaranteed, 100% risk free profit, or, more formally, a bastard.

** - Microsoft .Net v2.0 may need to be installed to get this working. You have my word it's not a virus or anything dodgy.
( djtrialprice, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 23:58, 5 replies)

nice work
You should update that for the 2010 WC. Brand it with stupid logos of a company you make up and sell it for ££££. Some c*nt will buy it.
(The Archduke of South London I'm in your Girlfriend eating her organs, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 10:31, closed)

Well, I'm impressed
but that really means nothing. I'm impressed by shiny things with flashing buttons...
( b3th Not shit. Not mod., Fri 1 Aug 2008, 10:54, closed)

if it's that useless...
why not open source it?
(haberman is singing in the changes, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 12:16, closed)

@haberman
Do you mean, "it's not being used so you might as well open source it" or "open source software is generally useless"?

I've a few bits and pieces lying around that I've been meaning to open-source for a while. My first stumbling block is hosting a website to go along with the sourceforge page. I can't think of a good name to DNS register. I'm amazed I can actually get out of bed everyday.
( djtrialprice, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 15:22, closed)

"useless"
... I mean you wouldn't lose out by open sourceing it. I wouldn't claim open source was useless ... I've been using linux for going on 15 years.
(haberman is singing in the changes, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 16:48, closed)