The fourth annual Interactive Brokers (IB) college trading Olympiad has been officially announced! This year's competition appears to be unchanged in rules and structure from the previous years. The only minor change I have noticed is that they want you to explain more details about your program in the "trading plan" part of the application. This year you'll have to tell them what language you are using and how you will write/compile your code. They also want to know what method you will use to connect to the api (application program interface). I had initially given them my trading plan from last year which completely left this info out. They called me on it and said:
"Thank you for you interest in the IB Trading Olympiad.
We cannot review your application because it is incomplete for the following reasons:
-Trading Plan did not contain information regarding the API and programming language you will be using"
I had planned on completely re-writing my trading plan later and just did a quick copy and paste in order to ensure my spot in this years competition and get a paper trading account to begin testing with. Market conditions are changing so rapidly right now that I imagine the market will be a completely different place come January 12th when the games begin. Anyways, I gave them the info they wanted and asked about how to update my plan later. IB told me:
"Dear py,
You can update your plan until December 31, 2008. After the application is
approved, you can login in Account Management and update the plan."
So its that simple, just log in later and update it as you test your code. Good luck everyone, this should be very interesting time from automated trading strategies. All the market chaos seems to provide amazing trading opportunities, at least if your are cold and fast, robotic. I'll post more on the Olympiad later, I plan on re-publishing all my old posts on my strategy soon as I think its obsolete now. My last email from IB read:
"Congratulations, your trading application has been accepted into the Interactive Brokers Collegiate Electronic Trading Olympiad. Your Olympiad account is now open. You may not trade in this account until the Olympiad begins, but you can create a paper trading account to test your applications. ..."
So good luck everyone, am I the first person to sign up this year?
