RULES

Kickoff Contest: registration closed


Quantiacs’ Kickoff Contest – Terms and Conditions

 

  1. NO PURCHASE OR PAYMENT OF ANY KIND IS NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN THIS SKILL CONTEST.

  2. BY ENTERING THIS CONTEST, EACH ENTRANT CERTIFIES THAT HE/SHE MEETS ALL ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS AND AGREES TO ACCEPT AND BE BOUND BY ALL TERMS OF THESE OFFICIAL CONTEST TERMS AND CONDITIONS (the “Official Rules”).

 

  1. Sponsor: This contest, the Quantiacs’ Kickoff Contest (the “Contest”), is sponsored by Quantnet, LLC, a Delware limited liability company with a registered office of 874 Walker Road, Suite C, Dover, Delaware 19904 (c/o United Corporate Services Inc.).

  1. Eligibility: Participation in this Contest is open only to natural persons (“Participants”) who meet all of the following conditions (i) are residents of California at the time of entry; (ii) are eighteen (18) years of age or older at the time of entry in the Contest; and (iii) hold an active email address from Stanford University (name@stanford.edu), Berkeley (name@berkeley.edu), Caltech (name@caltech.edu) or UCLA (name@ucla.edu) at the time of entry in the Contest. Quantiacs reserves the right to extend the range of Participants during the course of the contest if less than 500 entries have been received from eligible entrants by June 30, 2014 as described below. Quantiacs also reserves the right to extend the range of Participants to single qualified students of other universites upon their personal request.

  2. Contest Summary: Participants are invited to submit algorthmic trading systems to Quantiacs’ website. Using Quantiacs’ performance criteria set forth herein, these trading systems will be evaluated using historical and live trade data from January 1, 2001 to July 5, 2015 (the “Evaluation Period”) as may be modified as provided herein. The three Participants with Trading Systems that achieve the three highest scores will receive monetary prizes.

  3. Entry Period: Entries will be accepted from 12:00:01 a.m. on April 16, 2014 through Midnight on July 31, 2014 (the “Entry Period”), provided, however, that if less than 100 Participants have submitted entries by July 31, 2014, then the Entry Period will be extended to Midnight on August 31, 2014. If as of August 31, 2014, less than 100 Participants have submitted entries, Quantiacs may in its sole discretion cancel the Contest. In such an event, the Prizes set forth herein will not be distributed.

  4. How to Enter: To enter, Participants must upload a Trading System (as defined below) during the Entry Period to www.Quantiacs.com by following the instructions posted there. Participants must include with their submission, his/her name, residential mailing address, email address and phone number. A Participant may submit up to three (3) Trading Systems per day during the Entry Period; provided however that each Participant’s single qualifying entry will be the Trading System that produces the highest Score as of on the last day of the Evaluation Period as defined by these Official Rules. No single Particpant may recieve more than one of the three Prizes defined herein.

  5. Live Contest Period: The contest starts on August 1, 2014 at 12:00.01 a.m. and ends on July 5, 2015 at Midnight (the “Live Contest Period”). During the Live Contest Period, no changes can be made to entries. All participating trading systems will be updated daily during this period, as new market data arrives. The results will be published on Quantiacs.com. If the Entry Period is extended to August 31, 2014 as provided herein, the Live Contest Period will start on September 1, 2014 at 12:00.01 a.m. and end on August 4, 2015 at Midnight.

  6. Trading System Technical Requirements and Trading Rules: Participating algorithmic trading systems (“Trading Systems”) must be developed in accordance with the following requirements:

    1. Trading Systems must be developed solely with the market data that’s provided from Quantiacs. The market data consists of end of day data of the 100 Stocks listed in the S&P 100 Index on March 30, 2014. The composition of the portfolio will not change during the contest. The market list will not be updated to reflect a delisting of a company or a change in symbol on Yahoo Finance after March 30, 2014. The symbol list stays the same during the length of the contest.

    2. Only the function inputs date, open, high, low, close, volume, exposure, equity and settings from January 1, 2001 until July 31, 2014 may be used to compute the output of the Algorithm. Reference market data provider is Teletrader. If Quantiacs determines, in its sole discretion, that market data from Teletrader is erroneous, Bloomberg market data will be substituted for the erroneous data.

    3. The code of a Trading System must be compatible to Matlab® 2013b and be compatible with Quantiacs‘s evaluation routines. A sample evaluation routine is provided in Quantiacs‘s developement toolbox. The evaluation routine on the servers may differ from the sample evaluation. The following Matlab®-Toolboxes (R2013b) are supported: Statistics, Optimization, Signal Processing and Finanical.

    4. The evaluation routine simulates the interaction with a broker and computes the portfolio equity curve. Quantiacs reserves the right to correct bugs in the evaluation routine during the course of the Contest. In such a scenario, all Participants will be notified about the correction, Trading Systems will be computed again and the corrected portfolio equity curves will be displayed at www.Quantiacs.com.

    5. A Trading System only qualifies for the grand prize if it would have produced the same returns, Sharpe Ratio and Score were it traded live during the Live Contest Period with an arbitrary broker account. In other words, simulated performance, Sharpe Ratio and Score cannot result from exploitation of a bug in the backtesting Toolbox or a loophole in the rules.

    6. Each Trading System must use the same rules for the entire Evaluation Period and may not vary in relation to changes in timescale for arbitrary periods of time. (e.g. „don’t trade in 2008” is an invalid rule).

    7. The Trading Systems must use quantitative rules only. This includes, that Trading Systems have to be invariant to a change of the market order or a change of the market identifers. E.g. buy Apple is an invalid rule.

    8. It is possible to trade long and short.

    9. The margin requirement is always 100%. If there is not enough capital to cover all current open positions, the system’s assets will decrease proportionally accross all holdings until the margin requirements are met.

    10. A transaction fee of 5% * HIGH-LOW is deducted for every change in position size. This simulates the impact of slippage and commissions.

    11. Each Trading System must have a runtime of less than 3 minutes on Quantiacs‘s servers.

    12. If a Trading System causes a runtime error, all positions will be closed. It will be called again with the next available set of market data, and so forth. As soon as the Trading System starts functioning again, positions will be built up accordingly.

    13. The use of the following Matlab items are prohibited

      1. MEX-files

      2. Java commands or object creation

      3. eval, feval, inline, and function handles

      4. Shell escapes such as !, dos, unix, and system

      5. Handle Graphics commands

      6. ActiveX commands

      7. File I/O commands

      8. Debugging commands

      9. Printing commands

      10. Simulink commands

      11. Benchmark commands such as tic, toc, flops, clock, and pause

      12. error, clear, and persistent functions

    14. Entries compromising contest machinery are disallowed.

    15. Manipulating the score, runtime, or error conditions is also disallowed.

  7. Evaluation and Scoring: At the end of the Evaluation Term, the final Score of all participating systems will be computed. The formula for the Score is:

Prizes:
    1. Each Participant’s single qualifying entry shall be the Trading System that produces the single highest Score regardless of the number of Trading System the Participant has submitted. The three Participants having the three highest overall Scores win:

 

Highest score:             $1,000,000 * returnlive* 0.1 up to a maximum of $100,000

Second highest score:   $500,000 * returnlive* 0.1 up to a maximum of $50,000

Thrid highest score:       $250,000 * returnlive* 0.1 up to a maximum of $25,000


    1. The prize money will be awared to the winning Participants within fourteen (14) days of the termination of the contest. No payment or purchase is necessary to win.

  1. Miscellaneous:

    1. In these Official Rules, are times are Pacific Standard Time.

    2. Quantiacs reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to exclude, bar or otherwise penalize any Participant if such Participant’s Contest entry contains malicious or harmful code or such Participant otherwise attempts to damage or spy on Quantiacs.

    3. By submitting a Trading System to Quantiacs, each Participant grants to Quantiacs an exclusive license to use the Trading System for any purpose, now or hereafter known, throughout the world and in perpituity, without compensation or notice to or further consent of the Participant, to the extent permitted by law.

    4. Quantiacs reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to modify the Official Rules if necessary to preserve the integrity of the Contest.

    5. Quantiacs reserves the right to disqualify and prohibit from participating any person who Quantiacs determines in its sole discretion is or is attempting to (i) tamper with Quantiacs’s website; (ii) undermine the legitimate operation of the Contest by cheating, deception or other unfair tactic; and/or (iii) otherwise violate these Official Rules or the Terms of Quantiacs’ website.

    6. All taxes, fees and surcharges on the awarded Prizes are the sole responsibility of the Prize winner. In the event that the winner of a Prize is ineligible or refuses the Prize, the Prize will be forfeited and Quantiacs, in its sole discretion, may choose whether to award the Prize to another Participant.



RANKING

Backtest

Since Aug 1st 2014

Rank
Name
Score
Upload Date
Trading System
Performance
TradingDays
Volatility
Sharpe Ratio
Sortino Ratio
Performance
TradingDays
Volatility
Sharpe Ratio
Sortino Ratio
yishuwei Rank: 1
Gender: N/A
Yi-ShuW
 
Contest
1.11
07/30/2014 08:10
i7trade
8.39%
3433
7.66%
1.09
1.93
7.41%
311
6.99%
1.28
1.45
davwmont Rank: 2
Gender: N/A
DavidM
 
Contest
0.85
07/27/2014 01:50
ts_7271
11.30%
3433
6.36%
1.77
3.11
10.08%
493
4.79%
0.85
1.69
SukruE Rank: 3
Gender: Male
SukruE
 
Contest
0.80
06/20/2014 08:56
bb4
14.45%
3433
19.64%
0.73
1.23
7.79%
493
17.40%
1.18
0.35
GabrielC Rank: 4
Gender: N/A
GabrielC
 
Contest
0.77
07/01/2014 10:21
First
15.00%
3433
18.02%
0.83
1.32
17.50%
493
16.23%
0.77
0.85
li485 Rank: 5
Gender: N/A
kechengl
 
Contest
0.68
07/30/2014 15:11
lkc_final2
5.48%
3433
7.68%
0.71
1.11
6.12%
493
6.64%
0.68
0.73
Junco Rank: 6
Gender: N/A
DavidH
 
Contest
0.52
07/06/2014 23:12
uniform1
9.41%
3433
17.74%
0.53
0.83
10.97%
493
15.34%
0.52
0.58
SercanA Rank: 7
Gender: N/A
SercanA
 
Contest
0.52
07/23/2014 15:34
trialOP1
9.40%
3433
17.74%
0.53
0.83
10.96%
493
15.35%
0.52
0.58
vnredmon Rank: 8
Gender: N/A
NobieR
 
Contest
0.51
07/24/2014 19:20
braeburn3
10.63%
3433
10.62%
1.00
1.72
4.61%
493
7.74%
0.51
0.48
wolffam Rank: 9
Gender: N/A
AlexW
 
Contest
0.50
07/18/2014 17:56
band1
9.18%
3433
15.77%
0.58
0.92
9.70%
493
14.34%
0.50
0.55
mehuloswal Rank: 10
Gender: Male
MehulO
 
Contest
0.46
05/31/2014 23:34
lowpassTf
7.63%
3433
16.38%
0.47
0.73
7.82%
493
14.24%
0.46
0.45
rwturner Rank: 13
Gender: N/A
RichardT
 
Contest
0.11
07/28/2014 19:30
defaultTS
0.91%
3433
11.78%
0.08
0.11
-3.72%
493
6.73%
0.71
-0.44
Ramen Rank: 11
Gender: Male
MansibR
 
Contest
0.11
07/05/2014 11:34
helloworld
0.91%
3433
11.78%
0.08
0.11
-3.72%
493
6.73%
0.71
-0.44
shallin Rank: 14
Gender: Female
XiaolinL
 
Contest
0.11
07/06/2014 04:01
xlin1
0.91%
3433
11.78%
0.08
0.11
-3.72%
493
6.73%
0.71
-0.44
cal2bears Rank: 12
Gender: N/A
ZhengyuanZ
 
Contest
0.11
07/06/2014 19:31
primitive
0.91%
3433
11.78%
0.08
0.11
-3.72%
493
6.73%
0.71
-0.44
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