Rules

Who can enter, what you can trade, how teams are ranked, and what gets a team disqualified.

These rules apply to both divisions. Each division also has its own rules on its page: Trader division / AI Agent division.

The two divisions at a glance

	Trader	AI Agent
Who trades	The team members themselves	An agent the team builds
Team size	3	1–3
Accounts	One $1M account per member ($3M per team)	One $1M account per team
Live trading	Jan 4 – Mar 25, 2027	Feb 1 – Mar 25, 2027
Submissions	Final report (required), monthly reports (optional)	Pre-report, post-report and operation logs
Tools	Trader Workstation (TWS) on your own PC	Your own machines or servers

Eligibility and entry

Open to undergraduate and graduate students. Entry is free.
One team per club or society per division; one team per person per division. The same person may enter both divisions.
Apply through the entry form, separately for each division. Entries open Oct 15, 2026 and close at 23:59 ET on Nov 15, 2026.

To be eligible for awards

At least one team member attends the opening ceremony, and at least one attends the closing ceremony (online attendance is fine).
Submit the final report (AI Agent division: post-report and operation logs) by the deadline.

Communication

All official announcements are made in the WhatsApp group, and rankings are updated weekly. Every member should join and check it regularly.

Trading rules

Accounts — Interactive Brokers demo accounts provided by the organizers, $1M each: one per member in the Trader division, one per team in the AI Agent division. Trader division accounts have real-time market data.
Instruments — Nasdaq-listed stocks and ETFs, and options on them. Margin buying and short selling are allowed. There is no restriction based on share price.
Leverage — up to 4x intraday, up to 2x overnight, up to 2x for short positions. See margin and forced liquidation below.

Disqualification

Maximum drawdown of 20%

At the regular close of each trading day, if a team's net assets are 20% or more below their highest value so far, the whole team is disqualified. The starting value counts as a peak.

The check is per team. In the Trader division it uses the combined net assets of the three accounts ($3M at the start); in the AI Agent division, the team's account ($1M at the start). A Trader team is not disqualified when one member's account falls 20% if the three combined do not.

Example: not disqualified

The three accounts stand at $1.1M, $1.1M and $0.8M. The total is $3M, no lower than at the start, so the team is not disqualified.

Example: disqualified while still above the starting value

The team's total grows from $3M to $3.9M, then falls to $3.12M. It is still above $3M, but it is 20% below the peak, so the team is disqualified.

Prohibited conduct

Any of the following, once confirmed by the organizers, means immediate disqualification and loss of all award eligibility:

Market manipulation — moving prices with real money or with coordinated trades by third parties in order to profit in the demo account.
Exploiting the demo environment — profiting from price-feed delays or from fills that would not happen in the real market.
Anything else that undermines the fairness of the competition.

How teams are ranked

Performance alone does not decide the result. In each division, teams are ranked separately on investment performance and on their reports, and the two rankings are combined with weights of 70% and 30%.

Performance rank — teams are ordered by final return over the trading period.
Final return (%) = (team net assets on the last day ÷ team net assets at the start − 1) × 100
Report rank — teams are ordered by the scores given by the external judges. How reports are judged differs by division; see each division's page.
Overall score — the two ranks are merged with weighted reciprocal rank fusion. Higher score, higher place.
Score = 0.7 ÷ (k + performance rank) + 0.3 ÷ (k + report rank)
The constant k will be announced later.

Prizes are worth $10,000 in total. The awards and prizes of each division are on its page.

Judges

The 2026 judges will be announced. See the 2025 judges on the Past editions page.

Publication of results and reports

Results are published on the official site: team rankings with team and university names, and the top 10 individuals in the Trader division with name and university.
Reports are read by the judges, sponsors and organizers. For the AI Agent division's traces and operation logs, see the AI Agent division page.
Winning teams' reports are published only if the team agreed to it on the entry form. Consent is optional and does not affect judging or eligibility.

Margin and forced liquidation

Competition accounts are Reg T margin accounts, so leverage and short selling are possible. If your account falls below the required margin, positions are closed automatically and without warning. There is no margin call by phone or email.

	Intraday	Overnight
Long	25% margin (up to 4x)	50% margin (up to 2x)
Short	Capped at 2x	50% margin (up to 2x)

Two ways positions get liquidated

Falling below maintenance margin — if equity drops below the requirement, positions can be closed immediately, even during the session.
The 15:50 ET check — every trading day at this time, accounts are checked against the overnight requirement and any shortfall is liquidated.

Example 1. A $1M account buys $3M of stock intraday. That needs $750k (25%), so it is fine during the day, but holding overnight needs $1.5M (50%). Unless you reduce the position by $1M before 15:50 ET, it is liquidated automatically.

Example 2. A $1M account buys $2M of stock and the price falls 40%. The position is now worth $1.2M and equity is $0.2M, below the $0.3M (25%) intraday requirement, so it is liquidated.

Things to know

A negative cash balance is normal when you use leverage; it shows the borrowed amount.
Proceeds from short sales are held as collateral and cannot be used freely.
Shorts approach liquidation faster than longs: when the price rises, both the loss and the margin requirement grow at the same time.