Congratulations @MarkRicho.
$10,000 coming your way!
Thanks to all our contestants also. Hope it was a bit of fun.
We're looking at more contests next year, and will be tweaking some of the rules and systems to incorporate some member feedback.
We're also getting close to releasing improved ranking and badges for better member recognition for the general platform, as well as a raft of quality of life improvements.
Cheers!
Hey Andrew,
I have another idea for the next competition, what about an investment as opposed to trading competition, where you start with 100K and the competition runs for 1 yr with some specific rules around the type of shares that can be invest in ie they must have a minimum market cap, or must have a share price above XX cents, or must be held for a certain period. I know this may reduce the number of shares that can be purchased, and may not be to the traders/punters liking, but it may be more aligned to the general Strawman community values. Just a thought.
IMPORTANT UPDATE
We've had to make some tough decisions this week in relation to the trading rules; both for our $10,000 competition and for Strawman in general.
As the Strawman Classic competition progressed, it became apparent that there was a way to exploit some short comings in the trading system.
Specifically, for stocks trading near the lowest possible price step on the ASX ($0.001) we were often receiving inaccurate closing prices. Although these differences were tiny in dollar terms, they were significant in percentage terms. Combined with a limitation of our volume matching algorithm, it enabled users to place trades at prices and volumes that could not have been realised in real life. In turn, it was possible to build substantial, yet ultimately unrealistic gains.
It's important to stress that users who pursued this strategy have done nothing wrong. They operated within the rules of the system, using the prices and volumes supplied, and were simply pursuing a strategy they (rightly) believed would give them the best chance of winning the competition. Frankly, it was quite a clever and resourceful tactic.
That being said, after a lot of internal debate, we felt that this approach was not within the spirit of the competition. The idea behind the Strawman Classic was to recognise and reward the best trader -- not the person most adept at discovering and exploiting system weaknesses.
As such, we're introducing a new rule that will prevent Strawman users from purchasing stocks that are trading below 2c. This limitation still ensures that the vast majority of ASX stocks remain in play, while effectively closing the existing loophole.
What's more controversial is that we've also decided to apply this rule retrospectively. Given the significant gains this tactic has yielded, not applying our rule change to historical trades would be the same as doing nothing at all. That is, those that have successfully prosecuted this strategy are so far in front as to be effectively uncatchable.
The next step was then to decide exactly how far back do we go. We could just apply this rule change to the start of the competition, but then we're selectively targeting only newer Strawman members. If this exploit isn't fair, why should we ignore it for more established users?
So, without wanting to play favourites, we've applied this rule change back to the dawn of time.
The good news is that, after extensive testing, we've seen that this makes no impact to the vast majority of users. Prior to the competition very few investors were playing around with such small stocks anyway. It also has no bearing on the Strawman Index, which has never purchased a stock below the 2c threshold.
With over 13,000 users on Strawman, it's virtually guaranteed that a few people will be disadvantaged (although it's also worth pointing out that others will get a benefit from erasing trades in penny stocks that resulted in a loss).
In the interest of fairness, we're happy to review things on a case by case basis. If you believe this change has unfairly impacted your returns and rankings, you can email us (admin@strawman.com) and we'll take a closer look. So long as we can see that the deleted trades were made in good faith, we'll happily reinstate them at the lower bound of the new trading rules (that is, 2c).
We understand this situation is far from ideal, but we trust that you can see our decisions are guided entirely by a desire to preserve the integrity and legitimacy of the competition. The reality is, if we did nothing, we'd still face plenty of ire -- just from a different set of users.
After all is said and done, the competition leaderboard, as of the end of trade this week, still retains many of the previous top performers. And these contestants have built gains that would have been replicable in the real world.
To be clear -- this change has already been actioned. So you can check out the leaderboards and your own profile to see if there's any change.
Please feel free to share your perspectives in this thread. (For those that would prefer to skip the discussion, we'd encourage you to adjust your newsfeed filters and turn off forum posts)