Post by Zachary Chua

Wrapped up IMC Prosperity 4 with a finish of 5th in Singapore and 262nd globally out of 18,803 teams. Much appreciation to Chun Yee Tan,Jae Vir Lye and Coen Tan. Couldn't have done it without them. Across the different rounds, we explored a range of foundational quantitative trading concepts and got to see how they are applied in practice. Market Making involved continuously quoting both buy and sell prices while managing inventory risk and trying to capture the bid-ask spread without being caught on the wrong side of large price movements. Mean Reversion focused on products that tended to trade around a stable fair value. We built rolling estimates of that value, used z-scores to standardise price deviations, and entered trades when prices moved sufficiently far from the mean. Statistical Arbitrage came up in products whose prices were linked to underlying components or baskets. We tracked the spread between related instruments and looked for opportunities whenever those relationships diverged from historical expectations. Game Theory (Manual Rounds) shifted the focus from pure optimisation to predicting how competing teams might behave. We explored concepts like Nash Equilibrium and experimented with different ways to model user behaviour and estimate crowd decision-making from leaderboard dynamics. I entered the competition with much more curiosity than experience, and left with a far deeper appreciation for how quantitative strategies are researched, developed, and evaluated.