About Contango

Contango started as a weekend itch: most "paper trading" sandboxes are either tied to a specific broker's API or so simplified that they don't really exercise a strategy's plumbing — reconnect handling, partial subscriptions, backpressure when the feed gets noisy, that kind of thing. I wanted something smaller and dumber that I could point at my own bots and just leave running.

So Contango invents a handful of tickers that don't exist anywhere else, walks their prices around randomly a tick or two per second, and streams the result over a small WebSocket protocol. That's the whole project. There's no order book, no matching engine, no accounts, and definitely no real money — just a live-ish feed to build and test against.

Goals

Keep it small enough to run comfortably on the cheapest VPS I own, keep the dependency list short, and keep the feed honest — bounded random walks rather than anything designed to look like a "realistic" market, since the whole point is that it's obviously not one.

Non-goals

Real market data, real order execution, historical backtesting data, multi-user accounts. Maybe someday, not today.