I also find it hard to believe that someone with no market experience can get almost a 10% gain in a few days.
its easy with forex. flip a coin. you have a 50% chance of doubling your money in a day. given a 0.070$ move from open value. at 200x leverage. IB must have rules about that. i would have just created two contest accounts. make one buy. the other sell. and finish the first day with 200,000$ in my account.
if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. since this is a forum, i am a bit hesitant to even believe someone up almost 10% in a few days. we'll see on Monday when a roster is put up.
you dont agree with my statement that you could flip a coin. choose a direction and have a 50% chance of doubling your money if the price pair moves an average amount that day? its like vegas.
no, i believe you there. i just didn't think that it would be that easy to direct cash from one account to the other. anything is possible.
nah you cant. you just have to have two accounts. let one go broke the other will gain a lot. then sit on the profits and hope for a prize
Another participant, nice! Sounds like it sucks for you that IB started a week late. I use both targets and stops. My computer is slow and my internet connection is spotty so I would be pulling my hair out if I had to rely on my code to exit a trade. I submit a basket order then rest until I'm flat in my base currency again. Ideally, my strategy will enter a trend after a non-trivial correction and stay in just long enough to see the trend start again. In the worst case, the trend will end up reversing and my strategy will stop out. Or, my strategy might get in too early and forego potential profit. I've noticed the price often gets uncomfortably close to the stop before falling back down to the target. At any rate, I would say my strategy is a trend follower. OTOH, I would also say the market is ranging right now, yet my strategy is doing phenomenal, so what do I know? I'm using 3-minute bars and should make about 25 to 30 round trips a week. The profit factors are larger on larger time intervals, but so are the drawdowns and the trades are less frequent. I went with 3 minutes to try to get as smooth a curve as possible in just 8 weeks. As I found out first hand at the beginning of the week, 1 pip spread + 0.5 pip commissions + 1 pip slippage prevents me from trading a shorter interval. When I left home a few hours ago, I was up to $117,000 with an 8 trade winning streak. I'm way past-due for a loss right now. Best luck to everyone participating.
I seriously thought about doing that, just for kicks. Another idea I had relies on how I think IB's paper trading works. If the paper trading orders are crossed with each other as well as with the real orders, then one account could place a buy for a ridiculously low amount and another account could fill that order. The first account would then sell at market. To turn $100,000 to $220,000 in 10 weeks, like the winner did last year, you would have to average almost 10% a week. If you had bad weeks, your good weeks would have to be better than 10%. IIRC, last year's winner wasn't real experienced either.
Holy crap.. up to 117,000?? Either you found the holy grail or you just happen to have started at the perfect time for your strategy..... Historically in backtesting what has your profits looked like? Is this what they have looked like in your backtesting results or is this unusual behavior?