IB Olympiad Final Week Eight

Liquidation Value: $1,356,716.21 +$76,913.75 on the week

Ending Positions:

Longs:

TTWO
RESP
KWD
DBC
CHK
BEAS
VMSI

Shorts:

DF

Naked option positions (options sold short):

ABH March 17.50p
CONN March 20c
EJ March 20c
FXP March 85p
IOC March 25c
JRCC March 20c
NTRI March 25c
SKF March 110p
SNP March 110p
SOLF March 20c
THRX March 20c

Well, I have to be very pleased with this result and I am. As I mentioned last week, the account surpassed last year's overall performance. A 36% two month gain on a $1M account is something to be proud of no doubt. And I feel pretty confident that the program could yield these returns in the real market consistently. The program takes a large number of positions so its diversified against a single bad trade and over longer time scales it is market neutral. In other words, it doesn't care if the market is going up or down. It does however greatly benefit from volatile markets and thats what we had during the competition.

During the course of this year's competition the S&P 500 declined 5.90% (open to close) and dropped as much as 10.2% (in the first three weeks). So I would like to especially congratulate any competitors that we able to make a profit during this tough period for the market. It may just be a statistical blip, but the market has been extremely volatile during the competition the past two years. Perhaps there is a lesson about market volatility in the early parts of the year or maybe its just a coincidence. Anyways, here's what the S&P did during the competition:

By the way, that chart is breaking pretty badly, see Stock Geometry for more details on my thoughts. I was going to post the charts of a few of the biggest winners for the program but the fact is that there were alot of winners. Like I said, the program was very diversified so there were a large number of successful trades. But there was one trade that it recently made that I am particularly proud of and resembles the types of trades that made my program bank. Click on this chart for some details:

So yeah, that was a particlarly good trade with perfect timing. If you are interested in some of the other stocks that the program got involved with check out my last seven weekly updates. For readers who trade, there are some really great trading stocks in the program's positions. I would urge traders to bring up charts of some of the positions the program had the last two weeks. I have gotten some good ideas from this software.

Well that about wraps it up, I hope others had just as much success as I did but not so much that I won't get a "third place" prize of $10k. But I realize that the competition was very fierce this year and it is unlikely that I will be in the top 13 (required to make 10k or more). I am mostly just happy that I was able to do better than last year. I have some good ideas for next year and I'm looking forward to getting started on a completely new program soon. While I just modified last year's program for the 2008 competition, I think I'm going to re-write the whole thing for next year.

I'll post an update after the final results are up, have a great relaxing weekend everyone!