Another month, another winner. We're excited to congratulate Spencer Singleton as the winner of the July edition of the contest!

His first prize is the consultation, where we're offering advice how to code the algorithm for robustness. The key is to keep the algo trading under any condition - to smoothly handle starts, stops, bad data prints, and other caveats of live trading.

Then we'll test the algorithm with IB paper trading and run it through the tearsheet to profile the behavior. Once everything looks good, he will claim the second prize and start trading his algorithm with $100,000! The algorithms runs for 6 months and Spencer keeps all of the profits.

Spencer is a student at Texas A&M University studying Supply Chain Management with plans to acquire a master's in Financial Management. In his own words,

"I stumbled upon Quantopian about eight months ago having a little experience day trading and swing trading my own accounts. Quantopian offered a very convincing product that I have enjoyed testing my ideas on. Many of these ideas would have been impossible for me to test easily before I started using their platform. I first heard about Quantopian from my friend telling me about an interesting website you can use to code stock trading algorithms. I started using Quantopian later that night and was hooked from the first day. To me there is something extremely pure about putting an idea into code then seeing a great backtest proving or in many cases disproving that idea. I look forward to continuing my journey into discovering the ins and outs of algorithmic trading on Quantopian!"

He learned python from this community and began testing his ideas. Armed with his new knowledge of python and finance, he set to work iterating through the code, utilizing the free data, and shaping his strategies.

Are you the next Quantopian Open winner? Submit your entry by the next deadline, August 17, for the 6 month contest. Then maybe you'll be on the winners page!