Results of the Gekko Plus Strategy Contest
The Gekko Plus platform ran a Gekko Strategy Contest: we invited everyone to upload their private Gekko Strategies to Gekko Plus and simulated those for almost a month. Read more about that on the Contest page.
The contest is over! For 25 days straight 23 strategies competed on the live markets to outperform each other. The goal of the strategies was to make as much profit in the markets as measured in a base currency (if the strategy was trading on USD/BTC the goal was to increase the amount of USD). Before we get into details, this is what happened to the crypto markets:
As you can see, the markets were quiet until the day before the contest started, after which it was a complete bloodbath. I don’t think anyone was really expecting this. It had a strange impact on the contest, but even worse: if you personally have some crypto, the last two months were probably very painful… Unless you were using the risk management provided by Gekko Plus strategies.
The idea of a Gekko strategy is to limit market risk and perform better than the market. If you’re unsure, watch this video where I explain exactly how this works. This does mean that if the market takes a downturn, a good Gekko strategy might not make a profit; but it will prevent you from losing as much money as “hodling” would have. Gekko measures this concept by the “alpha” metric, this number reflects how the strategy performed compared to the market it was running on. If BTC is down 40% but your Gekko Strategy is only down 1%, should you really be complaining? In a Gekko Plus chart this is shown as the difference between the green line (strategy performance) and the blue line (market performance). I also added this number directly on the Contest Leaderboard.
That’s not the metric we choose for the contest, but it’s still a very important one to keep in mind. In a market that’s crashing as hard as this one, it’s practically impossible to make a profit by trading spot markets. It’s definitely possible in other markets, but this requires a lot more risk as well. For example see the movie The Big Short where some traders made big bets on the housing market going down prior to the 2008 financial crisis.
Contest Details
Now the contest is over I’ve collected some interesting statistics about the contest, remember the statistics below reflect all participating strategies, not only the ones that performed well:
Meta
- Amount of strategies: 23
- Amount of trades by all strategies: 692
- Market data included in all simulations: 586.51 days
- Unique markets: 16
Performance
Crypto market performance:
- BTC/USD (GDAX): -37.65%
- ETH/USD (Binance): -50.94%
- EOS/EUR (Bitfinex): -56.81%
- Weighted average of the markets used in the contest: -39.38%
Strategy Profit:
- Average (mean): -25.60%
- Median: -26.79%
Strategy Alpha:
- Average (mean): 9.74%
- Median: 10.77%
Winners
I am very proud to announce that the winner of the Gekko Contest actually made a profit in this market! With a profit of 0.0977% fabrice8921 created the strategy Fabrice. The second price goes to Alchermes with the strategy IWannaBeRich-Private, losing merely 1.5% while Bitcoin lost almost 40%. As measured in USD, the strategy has lost money but it was able to keep roughly 37% more money than everyone who held BTC during the same timeframe.
I need to mention the second most profitable strategy: Ordine by DanteCpp, this strategy was trading on BTC/USD and only made one trade: Sell bitcoin while it was still above $5,600 in the first day of the contest, with the only losses being trading fees. While I personally think this is a great trade (and I’m sure it’s a trade a lot of people reading this would love to have made). It doesn’t qualify as per contest rules each strategy needs to have at least one completed roundtrip (which means a buy followed by a sell), to be eligible for a prize.
I want to thank everyone who participated in the contest! It’s hard to trust your private and profitable investment strategies to Gekko Plus. This contest was the first step towards winning your trust in Gekko Plus as a trusted intermediary. I also want to thank everyone who expressed interest and followed the contest. While the contest is now over, this is only the beginning of Gekko Plus. Stay tuned as we will be sharing a lot more details on the full public launch of Gekko Plus very soon!
If you want to stay up to date make sure to subscribe to the newsletter on Gekko Plus.
