Another question I have is whether sharing the code one's challenge algo would make one ineligible for the challenge? For an allocation from the third party? I prefer to share my code publicly, but maybe this practice has implications in this context?

"There should be a daily turnover of 5% to 20%."

How are we to determine pass-fail for turnover?

Assuming long-only and short-only would be o.k., would it be preferred to separate algos into long-only and short-only?

I'd be interested if someone could explain how the uniqueness score is being computed, and if it could be implemented in an algo (e.g. as an optimization constraint). I took a quick look at the corporate_pension_challenge_jan_2020.csv DataFrame and there were multiple columns by date; I'd expected a single column of returns. What are the columns and how do they allow a correlation check with the alpha factor returns data if they are somehow obfuscated?

First off, thank you for all the questions! We appreciate your deep engagement with the post.

One thing to reiterate – it's important to remember that we will implement a strategy in cohesion with many other strategies. That means that many of these rules have "soft bounds" - your colleagues might have come up with a strategy that naturally hedges or balances out with yours. We provide these purely as guideposts to give you some target ranges, and as you move outside them, we have to look harder to find offsetting portfolios to balance them out. If you have a 21% turnover portfolio, we won't really be concerned. If you have a 50% turnover, you're pretty far outside the guidepost.

We typically drop assets outside the QTU during implementation as they tend to fail one of our constraints: insufficient liquidity, market cap thresholds, hard to borrow, MLPs, etc. ETFs are fine. We look at your full portfolio and then just the QTU portion, so if you are long QTU/short non-QTU, it will put you at a disadvantage as we'll identify 50% of your portfolio as "difficult to implement."

You should focus on where you think your advantage is – if you feel you have a good ability to time the market we will analyze it such that we look at your ability to vary your bet direction and size. Do you go from +10% to -10% and from +10% to +20% effectively? Or are you always +10% and when you go to +20% those periods are relatively underperform? If you believe you have better ability to create a market neutral portfolio, time trying to "time leverage" is probably better spent refining your idea. Remember, our goal is to keep the portfolio invested.

You can deviate from a market neutral portfolio – there is no hard and fast "fail" threshold. However, your average beta-to-SPY over a < 4-week period should probably average out to 0. Ranking a broader universe of stocks is always preferred, but there are often sector and industry specific insights that are on a smaller universe of names that remain interesting.

I don't want to say too much about how the uniqueness score is computed, and you shouldn't use it in the optimizer (or use the optimizer in the first place).

Thanks Thomas -

Some follow up:

ETFs are fine.

What does this mean? So, could the algo trade only ETFs, and then you would determine the stocks in the ETFs to see that the requirement of "at least 100 assets in the QTU" is met? Or would one have to trade at least 100 stocks in the QTU, and then on top of that, some ETFs could be traded? Or did you mean something else?

I don't want to say too much about how the uniqueness score is computed, and you shouldn't use it in the optimizer

I guess you have your reasons, but I'd think it would be the perfect thing to use in an objective function for portfolio optimization. What's the point in doing it manually; that's what we have computers for, right?

You can deviate from a market neutral portfolio – there is no hard and fast "fail" threshold. However, your average beta-to-SPY over a < 4-week period should probably average out to 0.

Well, 4 weeks isn't very long...so you are saying you want market-neutral as a requirement, as I see it. I suggest you add this to your post.

What about dollar neutral? Long-only? Short-only? Anything in between? I think you are saying that dollar neutral is not a requirement.

One suggestion would be to use the requirements you've already laid out on https://www.quantopian.com/get-funded, and then describe which of those pertain as-is, which ones are different for this challenge, and which additional requirements have been added. Putting things in a table is sometimes helpful.

we will implement a strategy in cohesion with many other strategies

How are you combining strategies? Specifically, I'm wondering if you use directional (long/short) information, or if you convert to unsigned scores? For example, say one submitted a short-only strategy. Would it then need to be combined with a long-only strategy to achieve dollar neutrality?

Or are you using the end-of-day positions as alpha factor scores, per the definition on https://www.quantopian.com/posts/a-professional-quant-equity-workflow :

An alpha is an expression, applied to the cross-section of your universe of stocks, which returns a vector of real numbers where these values are predictive of the relative magnitude of future returns.

In other words, you throw out the directional information, and are just interested in the relative scores across the universe.

Is there any relevance that the source of capital is "a large US corporate pension fund" or is this just promotional information?

I find it a bit surprising that the pension fund would be interested in excluding exactly the same common returns factors as Quantopian? Please explain.

I gather that Quantopian will not be offering algos for direct investment by the pension fund, but will somehow be combining them, and potentially offering a single investment. It would be interesting if you could elaborate on what you intend to offer.

Any idea if ETFs are allowed in the Third-Party Challenge?

I’ve confirmed that ETFs are ok but one still needs to hold at least 100 stocks in the QTU. Does anyone understand why the pension fund would care about having a certain number of stocks, and from the QTU?

Maybe someone from the pension fund can speak to this?