Sean Gong, a former Citadel Securities options trader, opened a forum on Hacker News inviting users to test trading ideas through a market‑making lens. The post outlines his four‑year career, where he quoted two‑sided prices in nearly 300 stocks across India and Hong Kong, handling roughly 100,000 single‑stock options daily and managed the associated risk effectively.

His approach blends semi‑automatic models with human judgement. Gong explains that automation let his desk triple the coverage of peers, while he authored a 15,000‑word manual to train new traders. He stresses that many independent traders fail not from missing data but from mis‑framing the market and their execution strategies in volatile markets daily.

To help users, Gong offers a structured review: first, assess whether the perceived edge is genuine and why the market hasn’t acted. Second, calculate position size using the rule Position = Edge / Variance, which scales exposure to signal clarity. Third, test the idea against trading costs and liquidity and ensure it survives market slippage before deployment today now.

Participants send their hypotheses via the chat, and Gong returns a concise strategy report. The report critiques the idea from a Citadel quant’s perspective and outlines actionable next steps for production. The service is educational only, not investment advice, and mimics a Bloomberg‑style analysis without any affiliation to Bloomberg L.P. in the financial sector.