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Ready Trader Go winner announced at grand final

After three highly competitive rounds, Optiver held the grand final of the Ready Trader Go competition at our APAC HQ office in Sydney on Friday 1 April. We flew in the Top 8 finalists (11 individual participants) from universities across Australia and New Zealand to attend an exclusive viewing of the final round and announced the winner in an awards ceremony.

A big congratulations to Zack, the brains behind ‘The Alternative Option’, and a student who is studying Computer Science at the Australian National University in Canberra. Zack triumphed in the final round and took home the first prize of AUD $50,000. In addition to his prize money, he will also have the opportunity to nominate an educational institution, who will receive AUD $10,000, to enhance STEM learning.

When asked about the win, Zack said, “Participating in (and winning!) Ready Trader Go has been an exciting yet challenging experience. I had to trial many different techniques and strategies – most of which were terrible – before coming up with the final algorithm that won the competition. I highly recommend the competition to anyone who is considering it in the future years – just sign up and test your limits!”

Ready Trader Go, the ultimate coding competition, introduces university students to the fascinating world of algorithmic trading. Working in pairs or individually, participants will go head-to-head with contestants from across Australia and New Zealand to build the best performing trading algorithm on Optiver’s simulated exchange.

Greg Saunders, Head of IT Education at Optiver Asia Pacific and lead on the coding competition, said, “At Optiver, everything we do is driven by a desire for continuous improvement. That’s why, in Ready Trader Go, participants are encouraged to analyse their results from each round and continually refine their trading algorithm right up until the final round, which was contested by the best eight teams.”

When asked about how participants were supported throughout the competition, Greg added, “We set up a Discord channel where the Optiver team answered any questions participants had during the competition. We also held exclusive Q&A sessions where we gave the participants further guidance on how they could make the most of their performance each round. We really wanted to help the students push their programming and analytical abilities to the limit.” We would like to thank all finalists and participants for their efforts and dedication in building an effective trading algorithm and optimising it over three rounds! Your coding and algorithmic trading skills have made the competition an exceptional, yet rewarding, challenge for everyone.

Ready Trader Go finalists and Optiver team

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