The Trading Game

We’ve always had a tradition of running competitions on Trade2Win so, after the closure of the Forex Contest at the end of last year, it’s time for something new.

Our idea is to create a fun trading game based on your actual trades. We want to keep the rules to a minimum and leave it to the members to decide who's declared the winner.

The game will start on Monday, 30th September... good luck!

What is it?
'The Trading Game' is a monthly game split into weeks. Each week players post on that week's game thread an actual trade they made that week. Members vote on the trades they like using the 'like' button. At the end of the week the top 5 trades with the most votes win points. At the end of the month, all the points from all the players are counted up and the top 3 players each win an Amazon Voucher.

How to enter?
• Every weekend we'll create a new game thread in which you're invited to post your trades.
• You're only allowed to submit one trade per week. (If you post more than one, we'll only accept the first entry).
• You can join the competition at any time in the month.
• The game is open to everyone. Since the voting is done by the members, everyone including moderators and staff are welcome to enter.
• You can trade any market: forex, futures, stocks, options, money markets etc.
• Your trade could be a real trade or a paper trade, but it must be an actual trade and not made with the benefit of hindsight.
• Your trade must consist of two posts:

Post #1 will outline your intended trade BEFORE you take it, i.e. ‘go long at XYZ price - if it’s broken through the resistance level’ or, ‘go short at XYZ price - if it’s reversed off the resistance level.’ etc. Ideally, include a chart to illustrate your intended trade.

Post #2 will show the results AFTER the trade was taken and should correlate to post #1. It must indicate your entry and exit. If these differ noticeably to post #1, explain why.

The judges are you
The top trade each week will be determined by you, the members. Simply vote for trades which you 'like' using this button on the post:

It's up to you decide what you like. Perhaps the trade was well executed, exhibits good trading practice, show goods risk/money management or highlights some useful ideas and techniques. It could even be a losing trade.

You can vote for as many or as few trades as you like, simply by 'liking' the trade. Please vote on the 2nd post – the ‘AFTER’ trade. In the event that a member votes on the BEFORE and AFTER post for the same trade, it will only count as one ‘like’.

UPDATED 14/10: Paid staff on the T2W team may not vote for entries. NB. Volunteer mods are welcome to vote.

Points make prizes
At the end of each week we'll count up the 'likes' for each trade and announce the top 5 players, awarding points as so:

• 1st place = 10 points, 2nd place = 8 points, 3rd place = 6 points, 4th place = 4 points, 5th place = 2 points. (No points awarded for 6th place and beyond, sorry!)
• If there are two or more players with equal votes, the place will go to the player that submitted their entry first.
UPDATED 14/10: • If there are not enough entries with votes to fill the 5 places, points will be awarded to the remaining entries based on when they submitted their entry first.

At the end of each month we'll count up all the points and award prizes to the top 3 players. In the event of a draw the player that entered their first trade first in the month will take the prize. Only 3 prizes will be awarded, so if there's a tie for 3rd place, the 4th place will not be awarded any prize - sorry!

The prizes for the top 3 players will be:

• 1st place = $150 Amazon voucher
• 2nd place = $100 Amazon voucher
• 3rd place = $50 Amazon voucher

(NB. Vouchers in the equivalent GBP or EUR also available)

Any no-nos
• You're not allowed to ask members to vote for you or, for example, agree to vote for a player if they vote for you. If there is any evidence of canvassing/colluding then you will be disqualified from the game.
• You must follow the Community Constitution - any breaking of the site rules, inc. multiple accounts, abusive comments/content - then you will be disqualified from the game.

i might still be in a trade from monday, whats the rule then

I'm very much the new boy on the block and hesitate to offer suggestions, but this idea has a serious flaw or two.

Using the newly designated 'like' facility to vote for a trade is likely to be somewhat biased by existing affiliations - and grudges. A genuinely good trade - however defined - by someone who has achieved a significant degree of unpopularity will likely get less votes than it deserves than a mediocre trade form someone well liked.

And to suggest the votes should be based on the voters' subjective appreciation of the quality of execution rather than the result goes against the perceived wisdom that good trading is that which increases your bottom line - bad trading is that which reduces it. However we may wish to slice it differently, trading, like the real world, is based on results and not the style with which we lose.

I feel rather awkward commenting negatively on what after all is intended as a positive initiative, but think if any trading competition is to be fair, valid and worthwhile - the results should be based on objective criteria.

malaguti said:

i might still be in a trade from monday, whats the rule then

Click to expand...

If you're already in a trade before Monday you'll need to wait for your next trade. Obviously the game favors those that make at least one trade a week.

Purple Brain said:

I'm very much the new boy on the block and hesitate to offer suggestions, but this idea has a serious flaw or two...

Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback Purple Brain. Good or bad it's always welcome.

Of course you're right if you can vote for anybody then you could just vote for your friends, and there's nothing we can do to stop that. No doubt there will be some member that do that and that's not a lot we can do to stop it. We could have started adding all sort of rules to try to ensure that votes and trades were legitimate, but it wouldn't quickly become unworkable since we don't have a large crew of people to police it.

I take your point about how the result may well have some impact in the votes (so I've edited out from the announcement where I've said it's NOT about that - just to avoid confusion).

Ultimately the idea is to encourage members to share their trades and hopefully generate some interesting insights.

We'll of course review how it went after the first month, in case we need to make some adjustments for November.

Purple Brain said:

And to suggest the votes should be based on the voters' subjective appreciation of the quality of execution rather than the result goes against the perceived wisdom that good trading is that which increases your bottom line - bad trading is that which reduces it.

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Hi PB,
As Paul says - all feedback is welcome - especially constructive feedback such as yours.

In an ideal world, we would run a competition that is results based but, to do that, we'd need a platform of some kind. Unfortunately, that's not doable, so the next best option is the one proposed here. Whilst you're right that by definition good trading is that which increases your bottom line and bad trading is that which reduces it, it's nonetheless possible to have winners which are the result of bad trading and losers which are the result of good trading. I'm talking about isolated trades here, e.g. entering short when you meant to enter long and getting away with it in the case of the former, or having a good idea, executing it well and closing out for a predefined loss in accordance with your trading plan in the case of the latter.

As we can't easily verify the points made or lost by each player of the game, we don't want members voting for player A who - for the sake of argument - made a good profit over player B who 'only' made a tiny profit or even a small loss. Player B's trade may have been by far the better trade in terms of the idea, planning and execution - even though this isn't reflected in their bottom line. I hope that makes sense - more or less!
Tim.

cant we just declare a trade and the price entered (plus any background)....a bit like flashes thread but only 1 trade called in any week ?

sorry - I dont follow standard pairchart S/R point and prices etc etc .......I trade when my systems tell me to trade regardless of pairchart technicals

N

NVP said:

cant we just declare a trade and the price entered (plus any background)....a bit like flashes thread but only 1 trade called in any week ?

Click to expand...

Hi Neil,
The idea behind the BEFORE element is to help prevent players posting after the fact 'hindsight' trades which, needless to say, always work out very well! The S&R examples in Sharky's post are just that - examples. Please provide whatever background info' regarding your trading methodology (for the comp') that you want - that's entirely up to you. More off the wall and wacky the better! The objective of the comp' is to promote discussion about trading tools and techniques which, hopefully, will then become a useful resource along the lines of the Anatomy of a Trade Comp' that we ran as part of T2Ws Anniversary celebrations back in 2011.
Tim.

ummm.....ok .......will see what I can do....

N

Hopefully it's constructive criticism to suggest that this idea is far too vague and complicated to work. Do people ever really categorise trades as 'good' or 'bad', unless it's directly related to profit or loss?

Sounds more critical than constructive to me. How about explaining what you thought was vague and complicated and perhaps offer some suggestion for simplifying it? Now that would be constructive criticisim!

Okay, so I see you added a comment about how to categorise a trade...

Basically we don't want to make the rules too rigid, so we're not going to tell you what criteria you need to use to judge if you 'like' a trade or not.

I've updated the initial post, to try and avoid any confusion on this topic:

It's up to you decide what you like. Perhaps the trade was well executed, exhibits good trading practice, show goods risk/money management or highlights some useful ideas and techniques. It could even be a losing trade.

Click to expand...

Sharky said:

Okay, so I see you added a comment about how to categorise a trade...

Basically we don't want to make the rules too rigid, so we're not going to tell you what criteria you need to use to judge if you 'like' a trade or not.

I've updated the initial post, to try and avoid any confusion on this topic:

Click to expand...

I did add the comment before you told me off, Sharky!

Anyway, it seems to me that it will be difficult to judge a trade unless it was made by someone using a similar strategy. I wouldn't be qualified to say anything about long-term FX trades, for instance.

If someone posts a trade that loses a thousand pips, would anyone say they like it?

LOL, now I feel bad.

Okay, so I understand what you're saying; but the reason we called it a game was because we wanted to keep it fun and casual, and not to be judged as something more than it is. Think of it as an 'Am I Hot OR Not' for trading, if you 'like' a trade posted (for whatever reason), give it the thumbs up, if you don't, then just move on to the next entry.

We ran a similar contest before for the anniversary celebrations and we got some great entries that everyone agreed made for some excellent posts. That time we didn't define what would happen if there was a draw on the votes and got our fingers burnt, so this time we wanted to provide just enough rules to resolve any foreseeable issues.

First week thread is now live here:
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/t2w-announcements/179614-trading-game-oct-2013-week-1-a.html