Ahmed Guecioueur is a PhD candidate at INSEAD, a leading graduate business school. He used the Quantiacs platform for his research and we met him for an interview.

Hello Ahmed, can you tell us something about yourself and your study?

Hello, I am an academic researcher interested in the behavior of market participants. I find that trading (and finance in general) are great settings for studying human behavior because traders have very strong incentives to maximize their payoffs while controlling risk within the constraints that they operate under.

Even so, studies suggest that the decisions made by individuals can be subject to behavioral biases that may result in sub-optimal decisions. After al...

Ivan joined Quantiacs in 2021 and won the Q15 futures contest. His system has got an allocation of 1M USD. Here you can read more about Ivan and his thoughts on Quantiacs.

Hi Ivan, can you tell us more about yourself and your background?

Hi, my name is Ivan and I am in my middle thirties. I got a Master Degree in Financial Mathematics and currently I am Head of Department in an international corporation. In my position I lead a group of programmers and IT specialists. I write mainly in .NET on a daily basis.

In my free time I like traveling, reading philosophy books, playing computer games and table tennis and watching videos from the Galkovskyland YouTube channel. So far I visited 30 different...

Hello quants! The submission phase for the Q17 Quantiacs contest started. You have time until end of April 2022 to submit your code. Once the live evaluation phase is over the best systems will receive allocations for a total of 2M USD.

This contest focuses on cryptocurrency data as the Q16 but it allows for shorting.

Photo by Art Rachen on Unsplash

In your user area you will find a Q17...

Hi there,

The set of 15 selected systems displayed on page: https://quantiacs.com/personalpage/submissions/tab_in_contest
or on page: https://quantiacs.com/leaderboard
is not the same that I have selected (before October 31, 2021) on page: https://quantiacs.com/personalpage/submissions/tab_candidates
to be my final set of systems to compete on the Q16 contest (for example: Sun73_Q16_4f).

Also, there are systems not listed anymore on the latter page (such as: Sun73_Q16...

Hi there,

Since we're approaching the end of the submission phase for the Q16 contest, is it possible for us quants to already know a little bit about the upcoming competitions?

Will the Q17 contest be designed similarly to Q16? In other words, will Q17 be based only on crypto trading (or will it allow for futures trading too)? Only long-positions allowed (or short-positions too)?

I would suggest (if feasible) to put in place a new contest allowing to trade both cryptos and futures, besides trading long and short in any asset, but limiting the overall leverage of the portfolio. For example, adopting a 130/30 portfolio structure, which is a structure with a net long position, but permits leverage with long and short posi...