Four SPS teams finished 53rd, 39th, 31st and 13th in the UK in the highly competitive Prosperity Trading Challenge, run by IMC Trading.
Prosperity is a 15-day global challenge hosted by IMC Trading. Teams are challenged to combine python skills, strategic insight and analytics to trade on a virtual market to lead their island into prosperity. The competition is aimed at university students with an interest in financial trading or computer science. During the competition, teams were challenged to develop an algorithm to trade desert-island themed products, such as coconuts, picnic baskets and amethysts in order to accumulate seashells (the archipelago’s currency). They were also challenged to complete ‘manual trading’ challenges in each round – calling on participants to use their maths, coding and economics skills to design a solution to different problems.
You can find out more about the competition on the website: https://prosperity.imc.com/
With over 9000 teams competing for the $25,000 top prize, the challenge was highly competitive, attracting the brightest minds from universities across the globe.
Five teams of mainly Lower Eighth pupils competed this year, although a number of Fourth Form pupils also competed. Given the extremely challenging content of the competition, and the fact that most other participants were university students enrolled in top computer science, mathematics and STEM courses, every St Paul’s pupil who participated should be extremely proud for perservering and completing the challenge.
Four teams performed especially well:
Sprofits inc. – Bolang Sun (Fourth Form) finished 223rd Overall, and 13th in the country.
Debug Demons – Ollie Wang, William Lau, James Chapman, Adam Ansari and David Choi (all Lower Eighth) finished 413th overall and 31st in the UK (284th in manual trading and 463rd in algorithmic trading)
Calcium Factory – David Chong, Yichen Yao, Hao-Tinh Le And Lucas Yu (all Fourth Form) finished 493rd Overall and 39th in the country.
GonnaWin – Ari Pissioti Capriello (Fourth Form) and William Standing (Lower Eighth) finished 711th overall and 53rd in the UK (436th in manual trading and 1812th in algorithmic trading)
Special congratulations go to these pupils for outstanding results, which show their great potential in trading.
Written by Erasmus Kahane, SPS Marketing Assistant and manager of IMC Prosperity teams