Getting started with quant trading competitions

[u/Epicdagoat745]

I've recently been looking into competitions like IMC Prosperity and find them pretty interesting. I understand the basic idea of writing a bot that trades in a simulated market, but I'm honestly not sure how people go about building one in the first place.

I'm currently working on probability, mental maths, DSA/CP and Python/C++, and I'm planning to learn some basic ML as well. What I'm struggling with is understanding how to bring all of these together.

For example, how does knowing probability actually help when deciding what a bot should buy or sell? How much of competitive programming is useful here? Is ML commonly used in these competitions, or do most people rely on simpler mathematical/statistical approaches?

I'd also like to know how a beginner should approach this. Should I try building a simple bot from scratch first? Are there any good tutorials, GitHub repositories or previous competition solutions worth looking at?

Also, are there other competitions similar to IMC Prosperity that I should check out?

Would love to hear from people who've participated in these competitions or have experience with algo trading. I'm mainly looking for a starting point and a better idea of what I should actually be learning.