Who here is participating in the IB Olympiad? I saw an older thread where people were talking about entering, so I thought I'd start a new one where we could post how our applications are doing. I turned on my application at 6:00 this morning, and now, 10 hours and 6 trades later, it's currently up about $6500. I thank God that it's doing so well, especially since I did zero forward testing. I was there watching it make its first trade; it's exhilarating to watch a piece of computer software make $2000 in 10 minutes. How has everyone else's luck been?
$6,000 in the first day, thats impressive. Has your performance continued to be as good as your first day?
very impressive. and here I am being all happy my bot didn't lose money this morning (had a bad week) mind sharing info on what you are trading? how much capital they give you? etc.
Did the original poster dissapear? What about other people in the competion? Are other people doing as great as this guy started?
Hi, I'm still here, I just haven't been checking this thread enough I guess. After no replies for several days I figured it would fade into oblivion. In a word, no. A lot has changed since last week actually. IB hadn't set up the accounts correctly so they halted the Olympiad about an hour after I posted my success. They reset everyone's balance and restarted this past Monday. In the interim I got ambitious and started tweaking settings. What a bad idea. When my account was enabled again I decided to try my strategy on a smaller time interval and in the first 24 hours I lost about $3,000. Slippage and commissions were eating me alive. Once I reverted to my original settings, I started doing better. I broke even last night and it looks like I broke $104,000 just a few minutes ago. I'm buying and selling currencies with a strategy based on a stochastic oscillator. Right now I only trade EUR/USD but I may try to diversify later on. IB started each participant off with $100,000.
Very impressive.... how did you develop your strategy? Just got lucky backtesting various thing? Or a strategy you have traded before? Looking at the past years winners you look to be on a good pace to win a lot of money... congrats
I haven't really traded before. After I heard about the the Olympiad I spent a lot of time doodling on graphs and trying to come up with formulas. Eventually I realized that what I was after was very close to a stochastic oscillator, so I started building around that. Well, there's still a lot of time left for me to screw up. I thank God things are going good ATM because I know there are a gazillion and one things that could go wrong. My code isn't even close to bulletproof. I have a strong urge to shut the thing off (or at least crank the leverage way down) and just sit on my profits. But hey, where's the fun in that? Current balance = $107,500.
I understand what you mean about a lot of time for something to go wrong. I recently went live in a real money account with an automated strategy. The first couple of days went GREAT and then downhill from there. Do you mind sharing a few more details about your system. Nothing specific. Just general concepts. For example: How are your exits structured? Do you use profit targets, stops, or only exit your position when you get a reversal signal from your strategy? Would you consider your strategy a trend following strategy, or counter trend? What sort of timeframe does your strategy trade on? Since you said the first day you had something like 6 trades in a 10 hour period, I would guess you trade on a rather small time frame. Probably in the neighborhood of 5 to 10 minute bars? Good luck and continue to keep us updated. I find it very facinating that someone with very little experience is doing so well.
So, I expect to see your name on the weekly roster for top performers? I'm in this too, and right now the market sucks compared to some easy picks last week. I don't believe in automated trading since there are so many variables involved, but I'm giving it a shot.