About Queen's Tower Exchange

Learn by making decisions

Our mission is to help students build practical judgement through research, engineering and competition. Teams test ideas, see the consequences in a market driven by real events, and use detailed performance feedback to improve. QTE combines responsibility within a team with competition between teams, creating a record of their work and progress over time.

How QTE works

• 01 Real prices, student competition QTE uses live quotes and trades for 180 US-listed equities and ETFs, alongside options on SPY and GOOGL. Quoted spreads are widened and order-book depth is simulated to create room for student teams to compete. Prices used to value positions follow the external market, so teams respond to real news, earnings and economic events.
• 02 Eight arms, different responsibilities Market Making, Market Taking, Options, Fundamentals and Execution connect different investment and trading decisions. Technology builds the shared exchange and tools. FPGA teams develop a separate trading system, while Agentic AI explores supervised trading agents with detailed operating rules still to be finalised. Each arm offers a distinct kind of work.
• 03 A learning loop with measurable results Students research an idea, test it, put it into practice and review the outcome. Trading teams are assessed against peers in their own arm under published rules, using measures suited to their mandate: returns, risk, liquidity provision or execution quality. Research and reviews support learning; scores belong to teams and use recorded trading results.
• 04 Shared tools, original ideas Technology builds the matching engine, market-data services, trading screens, risk tools, strategy runtime and research infrastructure. Trading-team developers build their own signals and algorithms on that platform. The separate FPGA project brings hardware and software engineering together to develop a low-latency exchange and trading systems.