Ha, yeah. My own approach has also been to mostly keep out of finance myself, but lacking a team of geniusses I have to do the whole 'stack' myself. I tried some demo-forex trading manually, just to test the waters, and while it worked quite frankly after just a week or two it just became busywork.

But now the translation from data->model->strategy that's something else, and highly relevant to my interests (the quant+technical side). But it seems like most traders don't much care for the technical side (nor brokers with their lack of api). Either that or the smart ones know to not make their fancy modeling and tricks public :P.