In case you haven’t seen it yet, we are currently building an entirely new contest with new rules, a new prize structure, and a new UI. That work is in progress, so in the meantime we are making three changes to the rules in Contest 38. The submission deadline for Contest 38 is February 1, 9:30AM ET.
Everyone can make 3 new entries this month, regardless of how many you already have entered. Previous entries will not roll over into this new contest making this a clean start. If you've made a new entry already this month, we will send you an email and ask you to re-submit your entry.
These are the rule changes:
- All orders must be placed using order_optimal_portfolio. You can use MaximizeAlpha or TargetWeights as your objective function, and pass any constraints that you’d like (though we recommend some further down in this post). This means orders cannot be placed with other functions like
order_target_percent
. - Algorithms must have a minimum EOD gross leverage of 0.7x. This means that more than 70% of your capital base will have to be invested at the end of each day. You can track your leverage with
context.account.leverage
. - All entries will use the 5 bps fixed slippage model in the 2 year backtest and in paper trading. When you submit an algorithm to the contest, the slippage model used will be automatically set to the 5bps fixed model for all contest entries. However, you can test your algorithm with this model before submitting your algorithm by adding this line to your
initialize
function:
set_slippage(slippage.FixedBasisPointsSlippage())
Why these changes?
The order_optimal_portfolio
function is the only ordering function supported in our internal live trading infrastructure. Everyone who receives an allocation must update that algorithm to use the Optimize API. We're steering the community to use the Optimize API at the very beginning of the process rather than stubbing it in at the end. This will make the simulations an even better predictor of the as-traded performance.
The minimum gross leverage check is being added to help transition over to the new contest rules that are specially tailored to cross-sectional, long-short equity strategies with a minimum per-asset holding time of ~2-3 days.
The change to the slippage model reflects an upcoming change to the default model on the platform. The new model is more accurate and more consistent with the tools we use internally to evaluate algorithms for capital allocations.
Last of Its Kind
Contest 38 will be the last of its kind. As mentioned above, we are working on an entirely new contest with new rules, a new prize structure, and a new UI. We are expecting this to be ready in early February. The three new rules in Contest 38 will also exist in the new contest.