R0–R1 · Reliable base layer
Common backtester, submission path, inventory-aware and signal-aware quoting variants.
CASE 03 · SYSTEMATIC TRADING
IMC Prosperity 4
Round 1: #77 worldwide, #1 in France · Final: #514 worldwide, #17 in France.
COMPETITION FIELD~20,000
18,803 teams from 1,549 universities.
ROUND 1 ALGO#77
Worldwide · #1 in France.
FINAL ALGO#514
Worldwide · #17 in France.
RESEARCH CYCLE6 ROUNDS
Baseline quoting to 50 products.
RESEARCH PROGRESSION
Every round changed the market—and the process.
The framework supported reproducible comparisons while the research expanded from quoting rules to volatility structure, flow identities and large-universe relative value.
R2 · Explicit payoff landscapes
Turn qualitative manual prompts into game-theoretic scoring and robust allocation decisions.
R3 · Options and volatility
Smile diagnostics, Greeks, passive quoting, hedging and portfolio-level strategy comparisons.
R4 · Counterparty-aware flow
Trader-specific features and selective fading, with toxic components disabled or downweighted.
R5 · Fifty-product universe
Group structure, pair relationships, carry and specialist overlays merged after attribution.
EMPIRICAL RECORD
Paths, diagnostics and outcomes.
All values are competition or backtest units—not investment returns. The final standing remains visible alongside the strong early-round result.
The highlighted point reconstructs the team outcome against the competition field.
A qualitative prompt becomes an explicit expected-payoff and rank-multiplier surface.
Strike-level structure monitored across days and intraday snapshots.
Equity paths and drawdowns inform candidate selection alongside terminal PnL.
The archive reports the complete result rather than presenting only the strongest intermediate round.
INFRASTRUCTURE AS RESEARCH
The framework was part of the alpha process.
Shared execution, diagnostics, product attribution, ablations and an exact submission archive reduced comparison noise and made failed candidates useful.
LIMIT
A competition is a synthetic market.
In-game liquidity, counterparties and scoring rules do not establish real-market profitability. The value lies in research iteration, integration and disciplined evidence.