pythagoruz

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Good luck! We could all use it.

The fourth annual 2009 Interactive Brokers Auto-Trading Olympiad begins tomorrow, good luck to my fellow competitors. When it comes to markets, chance is always an element and as such, luck is a good thing to have. We could all use a little luck (or a lot). One of my strategies this year is to hold an "oil balance" with half of cash equivalents via DXO (double oil). In other words, when I have cash left over I will buy oil with some of it to hold in lieu of US dollars. I have a growing fear that the US dollar is going to rapidly loose value as a result of the runaway inflationary lending/creation of money by the feds. So if that happened, I would be somewhat hedged by my position in DXO. On the other hand, oil could move for a number of complex reasons which are seemingly unpredictable; geo-polical, economic, liquidity driven, etc. In practice it will be a directional bet on oil, which I expect to rise having bottomed. So if I'm lucky, oil will move up substantially in the next three months. Anyways, may the best robot win!

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Interactive Brokers Olympiad 2007 Trades

As you may recall, I originally started this blog as a venue for posting information about my program performance in the 2007 Interactive Brokers Olympiad. There were some interested parties and I wanted a record for myself, so I posted daily and included all trades made that year. After I came in 10th place and noticed some heavy traffic on those posts I decided to remove them out of fear someone would copy my strategy and provide more competition in 2008. Well, I still use a similar strategy but I am less concerned with people seeing it now because the 2009 Olympiad is about to begin. Plus I think it might be interesting for others to see some of the problems I was having that year and how they were resolved. Enjoy them while they are up because I can't guarantee that they will remain so. I plan to compete again next year. At any rate, the Olympiad 2007 posts are back up for now:

Week 1
-wasn't ready yet
Week 2
-Day One
-Day Two
-Day Three
-Day Four
-Day Five
Week 3
-Day Six
-Day Seven
-Day Eight
-Day Nine
-Day Ten
Week 4
-Day Eleven
-Day Twelve
-Day Thirteen
-Day Fourteen <-missing
-Day Fifteen
Week 5
-Day Sixteen
-Day Seventeen
-Day Eighteen
-Day Nineteen <-missing
-Day Twenty
Week 6
-Day Twenty One
-Day Twenty Two
-Day Twenty Three
-Day Twenty Four
Week 7
-Day Twenty Five
-Day Twenty Six
-Day Twenty Seven
-Day Twenty Eight
-Day Twenty Nine
Week 8
-Day Thirty
-Day Thirty One
-Day Thirty Two
-Day Thirty Three
-Day Thirty Four

Final Results

So that's it. I hope some find this information helpful, I certainly would love to hear about what others have been doing in this competition. A major reason why I am doing this blog is to try and get exchange of ideas and experiences among competitors. So feel free to comment! I won't be posting as extensively as in 2007 but I will do a couple updates per week. So stop by, the game begins on Monday.

Monday, January 5, 2009

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.