Hi!


Welcome to the Alpaca trading competition. We can't wait to have you join the tournament.

If you receive this email you are signed up and just need to do few things listed below
(i) Open a paper trading account using the email you shared in your google form application
(ii) Set your paper trading account to $100,000 as of August 10th 930EST
(ii) Start trading on August 10th!

If you have any questions or queries, just hit reply to contact someone from our team.

Best regards,
Etienne & Alpaca team

welp.. this was uh.. huh...

ok first off, there is a leaderboard:

https://alpaca.markets/learn/leaderboard-00/

so theres that. apparently it updates once a day? i dont know..

tr for the day;

woke up with instructions that i should totally reset my account, which i did. 9:35am i try to enter a position and nothing happens. i notice that when i reset the paper trading account it also reset the api key for that account. and there is a rule that once you start the competition, you cant _re-generate_ your api key. so i dont know if im in our out of this thing because technically i did not regenerate it, i generated it, because suddenly i didnt have one.

yeah. ok we will see.

stack is 100k. 4x margin. started by shorting tesla, got up a few percent, then switched to a long position, got up some more, ended up about +$7800. full disclosure i was manually entering positions because i actually got the working code for my entry indicators up and running around lunch time today. also, no one cares, there arent exactly rules about it. so i spend the rest of the morning tuning elements of my alg, focusing on how to optimize loss tolerance, essentially, on both the up and downside.

and then things got real weird. i was in a long position and got dumped on a reversal, which is fine, and then about 10 minutes later im like wow i thought i was up a lot more than $2k.. and then i realize, the code i ran didnt flatten my positions. so -5k on a technical issue.

i log into their slack to find out if this is a known issue and someone tells me it literally happened ot them earlier. not good.

also see someone saying the alpaca stock feed is about 4-5 minutes behind e-trade. also not good.

long story short i ended the day up like .1%.

the good news is that i came up with a real spicy alg alteration that might make this all quite a bit more profitable. so theres that.

im having fun. learning a ton of code shit. alpaca is a new site, theres gonna be growing pains. i think its awesome, what they are doing, and im happy to help the uncover any issues now before they end up costing people money in production.

hopefully im still in the contest and didnt get fucked over by the api key nonsense.. ha ha ha... will update when the leaderboard goes live.

welp, looks like the leaderboard is up.... and we arent on it. but it might only be top 10? i reached out for clarification in both slack and email and havent gotten a response.

full disclosure i stacked into tsla at market close so its proooobably for the best that we aint on no leaderboard any time soon and bonus lol only fucking tesla can bump 7% on news of a stock split, hats off to you elon.

the bad news: the key snafu has excluded us from the competition. had a lovely convo with a site admin about it this morning, and we're both looking forward to the next competition.

the good news: my alg absolutely fucks.