Once the competition ends its live period (currently 4 months for Q22), the prizes are given. That means that at the end of those 4 months we sort all strategies and only the top 7 by sharpe ratio are eligible for prize and get allocation: 1st place 1M, second place 500k etc. and this cannot be changed afterwards. The prizes are not given on the daily basis and certainly not during the contest live period. You can find more info in the contest rules page on our website.

For your second question, we assume risk-free rate to be zero. You can find additional information about how we use sharpe ratio here.

Regards

Yes, that's right. We will announce next contest soon, but roughly, the deadline period will be a couple of months away, so the users get enough time to develop their strategies.

Regards

It is weird that a strategy that return is less than risk free return can win

@support said in Question about the contest structure:

at the end of that period the prizes will be given to the winners.

what's the prize referring to? is it 10% profit of the allocated amount of money to the algo? if that is the case, does that mean the amount allocated will change every day according to the ranking?
e.g.

17-Feb user A is 1st => allocated 1M
17-Feb user B is 2nd => allocated 0.5M

prize for 17-Feb is 10% of daily profit according to above allocation.

18-Feb user C is 1st => allocated 1M
18-Feb user A is 2nd => allocated 0.5M

prize for 18-Feb is 10% of daily profit according to above allocation?

There are two ways of how you can select your strategies to participate in the contest.
The first way is to use our auto-select feature. If it's turned on, then the top 15 strategies by performance will be automatically selected for participation.
The second way is to disable auto-select feature and use manual selection, after which you will have to hand-pick the strategies that you would like to participate.

It appears that you used manual selection at that time but didn't select any strategy manually. After careful review we concluded that you didn't break any other rule and your strategies are eligible for participation, and because this is a mistake users often make, we will add your submissions to the Q22 contest.

Regards

Each contest has it's deadline period, for Q22 it was 31st of January. The live period is 4 months during which strategies will be evaluated and at the end of that period the prizes will be given to the winners. So to answer your question, yes, user needs to backtest and submit the strategy before the submission deadline and pass the filters (sharpe ratio, liquidity etc.) in order to participate in the contest. After that, all participating strategies are evaluated on real data in the following contest period (usually 4 months) and the score is calculated as a sharpe ratio. You can check what it is and how is it calculated in the documentation page on our website.
Hopefully this will clear up the confusion, and if you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.

Best regards