Our highly popular student coding challenge – Ready Trader One – is in its second year now. The latest finals took place on 7 April 2021, with the top qualifying teams of 266 entrants (416 individual participants) from universities across Australia and New Zealand competing against each other. This year a big congratulations went to Team Integreats – two students from the University of New South Wales – whose Python autotrader outperformed all other algorithms to finish in 1^st position. The pair go home with the title of Ready Trader One champions and prize money worth $50 000.

Ready Trader One pits teams against each other to code an autotrader that must outperform each other’s algorithms in a simulated market. At Optiver, we’re big believers in continuous improvement. That’s why during the competition, our experts give each team feedback and guidance to help them make the most of their performance. We want them to push their programming and analytical abilities so that everyone achieves a high level of competitiveness. The proof of which can easily be seen in this year’s competition.

After the three qualifying rounds, the finals were contested by 8 teams. This year saw every single team achieve a profitable result and the leader board was highly contested. You can take a look at the final results on the leader board here and watch all of the action from the final, along with commentary from Optiver APAC’s IT Educator Greg Saunders and final word from Sydney CTO Scott McKenzie, in the video below.