(click to enlarge)A few quick things I noticed and was suprised by:
- The leader for the entire competition ended up in 2nd (Ahmed Taha)
- There were not many people who placed (not all prizes were awarded)
- The rate of return greatly increased up to first place, much more steep than last year
- To get $10k you needed more than a 30% gain in two months
- To get $100k you needed more than a 260% gain in two months
- Roughly 1/3 of winners were attending school outside the US
14 comments:
Hey congrats hunter for winning 3 times in a row.Thats really great achievement!
I made lot of mistakes,though place on 16 is not that much bad.
do you have any idea, we beat how many participants and ended our account in +ve?
Who are these familiar names on the list?
I would like to interact with them.
Hey chintan,
Thanks, congrats to you as well.
As far as familiar people. Well you were one of them =). Another is #21, Ryan. I got to school with him and encouraged him to compete this year. I thought I recognized one other from the comments but now I can't recall which one.
I'm going to send an email to IB to see if they can tell me some stats about this year's competition. I hope to include those numbers in my final post about the 2009 Olympiad.
lolzzzzzzzzzz.
Just Out of Curiosity ,I want to know that,is there any bright future in systematic trading Or still its IBs' army of traders who will rule as usual?
Congratulations on your success! 29th is a great showing.
I entered for the second time this year and placed 43rd. Not phenomenal but solid nonetheless.
I'm looking forward to seeing if IB provides you with any data about the competition.
Here's to next year!
-Jim N.
Hey Jim, thanks and congrats to you as well. Still no response from IB but they are historically very bad with email correspondence....
hunter - great blog
372 applications from 41 countries were accepted, but it looks like fewer than a fifth of the contestants built a compliant system and ended up with a positive account balance
http://investors.interactivebrokers.com/en/general/about/mediaRelations/03-26-09.php?ib_entity=llc
Hey Kevin, thanks for stopping by and congrats to you! $100k is some serious cash and you deserve it with a 340% two month gain.
So you were trading energy futures options, is that correct? I noticed you weren't in the top ten until you surged in the final week, like I did (but much more than I did). That must mean you were long oil during that time, as my program was. My oil strategy was, no doubt, much less sophisticated than yours. I was just buying DXO with a % of "free" cash.
I'm curious, are you in grad school? What do you study? Will you be competition for me next year? =)
Last year I was in the lead for much of the contest with a system to make markets and scale into VIX futures positions but then was beat out in the final week to finish third. This time around, in the process of a move back up to New York from Austin, I wasn't able to start putting real risk on until the later stages.
With respect to crude, I didn't have a particular directional opinion, but rather was levered to profit from a big outright move (either way) or from a change in the price and implied volatility relationships between it and its products - RBOB gasoline and heating oil. Fortunately, the market behaved favorably and I managed to come out on top. The platform itself I developed from the ground up in Java over a couple months of pretty much continuous effort, overengineering everything so that I can use the technology in the future to manage large options portfolios on a proprietary basis.
As far as grad school goes, I've been at it part-time for a couple years now, mostly financial math and some cs. Hopefully I'll have things wrapped up by next year, but we'll see.
Hey Out of curiosity, i wanted to know your age hunter.I hope you wont mind.And ofcourse If its possible to know then age of Kevin,too.
Its just a Vague question!
Yeah, I saw that you got third last year so that's impressive to get 1st this year. Shows consistency.
Since you moved from Austin up to NY, I'd guess you landed a nice job from your performance last year. And after getting first this year I bet there will be plenty of opportunities in NYC. My program didn't perform nearly as well as yours and I've been contact a few times by interested parties.
My system is also built to handle large option positions and most of my profits came from looking for outlying cases of volatility. Of course I don't know any details of your strategy, but it sounds like an interesting idea to trade volatility spreads between energy and energy products.
Anyways, thanks again for stopping by and congrats on your success. Good luck with your studies up in NYC.
Chintan, I'm 26 and working on a phD in materials science. That means I'll be competing for 1-2 more years.
Last month I became a 19 year old guy.So I will compete for 3/4 times atleast.lolx
But Do you think that next year IB will also organize contest?
I guess,IB's main agenda is to increase their retail brokerage buisness by making popular itself with this Olympiad.So they may also organize in 2010 and even further.as they mentioned students from far away countries also participated.That means IB is becoming popular in other countries and getting good mouth to mouth publicity.
If they organize it next year then I would love to use some of the most riskiest strategies.
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