w00t! IB Trading Olympiad begins
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Quote from filsputin:
Hello, I am in the competition and my current ranking is 6th. I came across this thread and thought it would be fun to make friends with the enemy. So if anyone has questions about myself or my strategy, I will try to reply with something misleading.
Anyway, I was really surprised by the lack of competitors in this kind of contest. Since the second place guy has only made 30% and 10th place about 10% halfway through, I bet that we're competing against 30-40 very risk-averse people. What do you think? Also does anyone know whether the min. 25 trades counts a purchase and sale as two separate trades? Or do they mean opening 25 new positions? Good luck everyone!
Come on, I looked at your pics weeks ago, doesn't look like a risky guy... You are pretty stable in the ranking. I guess you recovered from the minor loss last week?
Risk-averse? You might be talking about me. I actually started last Friday, 5 trades so far, other than the 2 loss trades due to bugs in program (it did some after hours trades yesterday), the strategy seems doing well. A little hard to reach my target 1% per day, but it is doing 0.5% per day, at least day day up.
I watched you guys running for almost 3 weeks... Good luck everyone, I only want a placing prize!
Welcome, filsputin. I appreciate you stopping by. Would you mind sharing, in general terms, how your strategy works? I'm curious what time interval it trades, what markets it trades, and how much of the account it risks, as well as whatever else you're willing to share about it.
I'm also curious about where you go to school and what you're pursuing there, as well as how you found out about the Olympiad and got involved.
Thanks.
I'm also curious about where you go to school and what you're pursuing there, as well as how you found out about the Olympiad and got involved.
Thanks.
I'd say it's easier to win a few extremely high-risk trades over a short period of time than it is to consistently compound wins at any risk level. Admitting that, there could be huge returns anytime from now until the last day even if there aren't any accounts that grow consistently.
I wonder the same thing. Either way the minimum might become a problem for the high-risk squatters.
My strategy is doing pretty good, tempting me to raise its leverage again. Current balance = $103,500.
... Interactive Brokers ( www.interactivebrokers.com ) sponsored a Trading Olympiad for college students earlier this year ("Get With the Program," Nov. 7, 2005) in an effort to identify some of the best and brightest up-and-coming techies...
The victorious Christmas won a very real $50,000, which IB will match in a donation to his grad school in Austin. The electronic brokerage paid out a total of $307,000, including $1,000 each to 100 participants. "Anybody who entered and made a penny won $1,000," says executive vice president Steve Sanders. To top it off, the company hired the fifth place winner, Li Zhiyan, of theUniversity of Toronto.
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This is totally a loser's game. #20 made $0.41 out of $100K. There are at lest 100 participants. So that means, At most, the top 19% made money money, so 80% of bots are losing. It is a game for students, not for pros.
But I am still interested in learning how automation works here.
The victorious Christmas won a very real $50,000, which IB will match in a donation to his grad school in Austin. The electronic brokerage paid out a total of $307,000, including $1,000 each to 100 participants. "Anybody who entered and made a penny won $1,000," says executive vice president Steve Sanders. To top it off, the company hired the fifth place winner, Li Zhiyan, of theUniversity of Toronto.
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This is totally a loser's game. #20 made $0.41 out of $100K. There are at lest 100 participants. So that means, At most, the top 19% made money money, so 80% of bots are losing. It is a game for students, not for pros.
But I am still interested in learning how automation works here.
I'm a Comp Sci/Econ/Math major at Amherst College who would like to start my own investment fund someday. I just ran across an ad for the Olympiad fairly late, I'd say around November?
I won't go into much detail, but I will say that my strategy is very simple. Based on high volume and using the momentum of stocks, my program automatically trades once a day, and I wouldn't say that there's that much risk. I'm not sure how it would generally compare to everyone else's riskiness. Anyway I'd say I've been very lucky so far since I've only lost about 2% in my losing trades and +5-10% in the rest.
There may be 100 participants, but I doubt that many people got their strategy off the ground. For me at least, I had a hard time figuring out how to communicate with TWS. I've got things to do during the day, so my program does everything automatically. Just curious how automatic your programs everyone?
By the way, my stocks have done pretty well this week so look for me again next monday.
Thanks for the information qll.
This actually is a winners game. Anytime you're getting a win rate of 20% in any competitive discipline, you're doing pretty darn good, and much better than the win rate for discretionary traders (way too much emotion and grey area there).
I've codified my own trading process so that I just get an alert and push a button, with a GRID for the potential results and the corresponding action I sould take.
Would I like to automate the whole process?
You betcha!
So lets hope they continue making steps foward in the automated trading process, which this competition most definitely is a part of.
Good trading,
Jimmy Jam
Quote from JimmyJam:
Thanks for the information qll.
This actually is a winners game. Anytime you're getting a win rate of 20% in any competitive discipline, you're doing pretty darn good, and much better than the win rate for discretionary traders (way too much emotion and grey area there).
I've codified my own trading process so that I just get an alert and push a button, with a GRID for the potential results and the corresponding action I sould take.
Would I like to automate the whole process?
You betcha!
So lets hope they continue making steps foward in the automated trading process, which this competition most definitely is a part of.
Good trading,
Jimmy Jam
i am in the learning stage too. i found this contest is no use for anyone outside it.
i hope ib can publish some codes, methods etc, not in the 100% detailed way. i am still trying to build my first bot. so far 0% stage. i was a programmer, but i have not seen any sample code so i don't know where to start. i am not in the usa now, so it is difficult to find books or meet with pros.
Hello guys, I just wanted to mention to all of you that I am yet another person competing in IB's Olympiad. I've been doing pretty well so far, but I have always been right below #10 every week and haven't had the opportunity to see my name listed in the top 10.
At the close of trading yesterday my account was just above $125,000. During trading today, my program accidentally bought the wrong futures contract, and took a $50,000 loss. It was trying to short YM MAR 07 at a LMT of 12592, but instead placed the limit order for the June contract, and got filled at my limit price (since the bid size was 1, the rest filled at my limit). The quote for the June contract was near 12700, so immediately after filling, I was sitting with over a 100 point loss. My account is now at a little over $70k, which gives me little hope of getting it back to the top 10. I am still going to continue trading for the rest of the competition and hope I get lucky, but this really ruins my chances of finishing well. Luckily the top 100 participants get $1000 each, heh. Luckily this bug was exposed while trading with funny money and not on my real account.
Good luck to all the rest of you, and happy auto trading!
- Paccc
At the close of trading yesterday my account was just above $125,000. During trading today, my program accidentally bought the wrong futures contract, and took a $50,000 loss. It was trying to short YM MAR 07 at a LMT of 12592, but instead placed the limit order for the June contract, and got filled at my limit price (since the bid size was 1, the rest filled at my limit). The quote for the June contract was near 12700, so immediately after filling, I was sitting with over a 100 point loss. My account is now at a little over $70k, which gives me little hope of getting it back to the top 10. I am still going to continue trading for the rest of the competition and hope I get lucky, but this really ruins my chances of finishing well. Luckily the top 100 participants get $1000 each, heh. Luckily this bug was exposed while trading with funny money and not on my real account.
Good luck to all the rest of you, and happy auto trading!
- Paccc