Every year, the Trexquant Alpha team hosts an alpha competition to teach the next generation of quantitative researchers how to find alphas -- profitable and reproducible trading signals that power quantitative hedge funds. We’ll provide the data, cloud computers, backtesting platform and the lessons. Are you up for the challenge?

Background

To participate in the competition, all that is required is an interest in financial markets and enough programming experience to allow you to translate your ideas into Python code. The objective of the competition is to create a variety of uncorrelated signals, which we call Alphas, that are profitable across varying market conditions.

Competition participants will use our intuitive web-based platform, Trexsim, to develop and backtest Alphas, which are statistical arbitrage signals for trading global equities.

Trexsim has a variety of pre-cleaned data and built-in functions available, along with a framework to develop custom functions for data manipulation, which allows participants to rapidly iterate and backtest a variety of ideas. Competition participants thus avoid time-consuming data cleaning and simulation development effort, and instead directly focus on working with a variety of data to create useful trading signals.

The competition lasts for eight weeks. At the conclusion of the event, we will score the Alphas created by each entrant, rank each candidate, and award prizes to the top performers.

Prizes

1st place $7,000

2nd place $5,000

3rd place $4,000

4th place $3,000

5th place $2,000

6-10th place $1,000

In addition to the prizes above, we will hold a raffle for 3 iPad Pros for all non-winner participants.

Timeline

January 3, 2018 - Competition begins

January 14, 2018 - Registration deadline

February 28, 2018 - Competition ends