One Week Till Go Time

A week from today the fourth annual Interactive Brokers auto-trading college Olympiad begins. While the competition is organized such that most of the program development should be done by now, I won't hold it against anyone if they still have a ways to go. There's no way around it, this is a tough and time consuming task. Recall that I started a week late my first year competing in 2007. Then it took me another week or two to write the option writing strategy which ended up producing most of my profit. If its your first year then I bet you're finding that seemingly simple stuff like observing market data can be complex. All I can say is, keep at it. With enough time and perseverance you will get it working, and if you're late don't sweat it. I started weeks late in 2007 and finished 10th for a $10k prize. Plus, timing can go both ways. Last year the market collapsed in the initial days of the competition and my account lost 30%+ before bouncing back to end in 19th with a 36% profit. If you had started late last year you could have avoided some of that chaos although this year looks to be much less volatile.

To get everyone warmed up here are some stats about the competition which is in its fourth year. Interactive Brokers pays out a total of "$400,000 in prizes to the winning students. The contest spans an eight week trading period in which student traders start with $1 million in phantom money.

Last year's winner was Chirstopher Michalak, a student at the University of British Columbia. At the close of competition, Michalak had grown his account to a balance of over $3.1 million, garnering the top $100,000 prize."

The prizes are hands down the biggest incentive here. If you profit at all and don't break any rules, you are pretty much guaranteed $1000 since they hand out 100 of those. But things really get interesting if you are close to the top 10. 4th through 13th get $10k, 2nd and 3rd get $50k and then there's the $100k gold medal. That's serious money! Since you have to be a student to enter this competition I think its safe to say that its a huge incentive for all competitors. It could be even thought of as a job, a job that rewards success.

"There were a total of 372 trading contestants last year, up from 203 in the second year and 102 in the first year. Last year also saw the addition of international students to the competition. Traders were allowed to program in languages from Java to C++, C, DDE and Visual Basic. "

"The need for financial programmers has been something that we as a company have tried to raise awareness of over the past several years," says Andrew Wilkinson, senior market analyst at Interactive Brokers. "It's much easier to take a programmer and teach them about trading then it is to take a trader and teach them about programming."

These quotes are from FinanceTech.com, more here.

For the next couple months the competition will become the primary focus of this blog. I'll be posting updates about my progress and hopefully others will chime in and comment about their trials and tribulations. If anyone else has an IB Olympiad related blog or website going please let me know so I can add a link to this blog. If there is interest I was thinking about starting a chat room too, it might be interesting to chat intraday about our programs and the market. I also have an algorithm written for posting the program's trades and scans in an IRC chat room in real time. It wouldn't be too hard to set something like that up if there were enough interest. By the way, I am in graduate school working on a phD in Materials Science at the University of Illinois.