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Competition ethics: where do we draw the line?

BUBugHunter99
Jan 25, 2026
906 views
29 posts
general
ethics
community

Some questions for discussion:

  • Is it ethical to use multiple accounts to test different strategies?
  • Should teams share strategies between competitions?
  • How much feature engineering constitutes 'leaking' domain knowledge?
  • Should winning strategies be open-sourced after the competition?
  • I think transparency and integrity are what make this platform valuable. What are your thoughts?

    28 Replies

    21
    NEnewbie_traderFeb 17, 2026

    Can confirm this approach works. I implemented something similar and jumped from rank 150 to rank 23 in two weeks.

    15
    ALAlphaNova TeamJan 26, 2026

    Interesting thread! I've been exploring reinforcement learning for portfolio allocation. The challenge is defining the right reward function.

    24
    RERegimeDetectorJan 27, 2026

    One more thing: the scoring engine uses a held-out test period that you never see. So your validation score is the best you can do.

    5
    RERegimeDetectorFeb 11, 2026

    Good point about overfitting. My rule of thumb: never trust a backtest with fewer than 500 observations in the out-of-sample period.

    1
    QUQuantDev42Feb 13, 2026

    Great discussion! This is why I love this community - knowledge sharing makes everyone better.

    10
    ENEnsembleKingFeb 11, 2026

    Have you considered using PCA to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space? I found that the first 10 components capture 80%+ of the variance.

    8
    COCovarianceKidFeb 13, 2026

    For those wondering: yes, you can use external Python packages in submissions, but they must be in the approved list. No custom C extensions.

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