Robotrader2020, algorithmic trading competition

I decided to participate in Robotrader and I believe that is worth to share my experience here.

I consider Robotrader as one of the referents in algorithmic trading education in Spain. It offers a series of lectures or seminars with some of the best professionals in algorithmic trading, investment banking, and technology.  In addition, it holds a competition in which the participants need to create an algo to trade automatically for two months. This is the 10^th edition and it’s been a great so far.

The main purpose is to introduce the world of trading and automatic investing to students and invite them to do it using different programming languages.

I think that it is a great initiative even if you have knowledge about investing in financial markets. It is very difficult to find professionals with knowledge in both areas. To be honest, it helps you to understand how difficult is to try to merge one traditional area like trading with technology. Obviously, it depends on each student, some of them will focus on high-frequency trading systems while others will focus in a more traditional trading system.  One of the things that I like the most is that it challenges you on the technology side. I mean, it’s not only programming the algo. It involves making research, try to understand how the markets move, designing the algo, backtesting, optimizing, choosing the right money management system, and putting this in production through a paper trading account. And when you think that you are done…  don’t forget to deal with connectivity because if you don’t connect, the orders won’t be sent to the exchange.

I will be sharing my experience during the competition. It started last week so I have a couple of articles to post.

Finally, I would like to thank the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (and everyone that is supporting this event) for this initiative.  Please see this link if you want to have a look:

https://blogs.upm.es/robotrader/

Thanks for reading this post.