HK vs AU vs IN Quant Trading Hackathon (Universities)
Hong Kong vs Australia vs India Quant Trading Hackathon
DO NOT register via Luma. Kindly complete your registration through our Typeform link: https://form.typeform.com/to/j3Rza4Ml
Partnering with Susquehanna, we are excited to present the Hong Kong vs Australia vs India Quant Trading Hackathon — a cross-border quantitative trading competition bringing together top student talent across APAC.
This hackathon features leading universities from each region, including HKU, HKUST, CUHK from Hong Kong; USYD, UNSW, UTS from Australia; and IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Roorkee, IIT Guwahati, IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, DTU and DU from India. Framed as a friendly rivalry between Hong Kong, Australia, and India, the competition focuses on quantitative trading in financial markets.
Participants will design, build, and deploy live quantitative trading strategies, compete in real-time markets, and present their ideas to industry judges from top trading firms. Beyond competition, students will gain hands-on experience with industry-grade tools while connecting with leading proprietary trading and hedge fund teams.
Team Formation Deadline: September 29 (Tue), 11:59 p.m. GMT+8. No late teams will be accepted.
What You’ll Do
Design and implement quantitative trading strategies
Deploy live strategies with virtual portfolio in financial markets
Compete against top teams across HK, AU, and IN
Present your approach to industry professionals
Network with sponsors and fellow quants
Win prizes and career opportunities!
Get cool swags from our sponsors!
Organizers
Roostoo Labs (AI × Web3 Startup)
HKU Quantitative Research Society
HKU Investment Society
Traders@UST
HKUST Quant Trading Society
CUHK Quant Trading Society
CUHK Strategic Investment Society
UNSW Competitive Programming and Mathematics Society
UTS Quant Society
USYD Women in Quant Trading
USYD University Network for Investing and Trading
IIT Delhi Blockchain Society
IIT Delhi Quantitative and Algorithmic Trading Club
IIT Bombay Quant Club
IIT Guwahati Finance & Economics Club
DTU E-Cell
Delhi University
IIT Roorkee Finance Club
IIT Kanpur Programming Club
Partners
Title Sponsor: Susquehanna
Cloud Sponsor: AWS
Supporting Organization: Central Quant
Platform Provider
Roostoo Labs (AI × Web3 Startup)
Competition Timeline
Sep 18 , 3pm HKT: Online Info Session & Workshop.
Oct 1 - Oct 3: Hackathon Begins. Preparation Period — Build your bot and test deployment on Roostoo.
Sep 29: Team registration deadline.
Oct 4 - Oct 17 (14 full days): Live trading begins.
During these 14 days, you are allowed to continue iterate your strategies and redeploy your bots.
Each bot must have at least 8 active trading days with enough trades made from strategies each day.
Before Oct 14 : Submit your trading bot repo link
Submission of open-source repositories with ReadMe for judging.
Oct 21: Top 15 finalists announced; 5 from each region.
Oct 27: Finalist team deck submission deadline (simple presentation decks and/or md files explaning your team’s logic).
Oct 29 - Nov 4 (excl. weekend) : Virtual Finale in HK, AU and IN (Tentative and subject to universities’ exam schedules)
One day within Nov 4-10 (excl. weekend) : In-person exclusive networking event in HK (For selected Hong Kong participants only)
Who Should Join?
This hackathon is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students who are curious about quantitative finance, trading, and engineering. We welcome participants from backgrounds including:
Computer Science & Engineering
Quantitative Finance
Data Science
Industrial / Mechanical Engineering
Experience with Python, APIs, algorithmic trading, AWS/EC2, or similar technical stacks is a plus, but not required.
Competition Structure
Evaluation Criteria (In Order):
Evaluation for finalist teams will be conducted in the following stages:
Screen 1: Rule Compliance (Mandatory Requirement)
Teams that violate any of the following rules will not be selected as finalists:
Trade Log Integrity
Bots must demonstrate consistent, autonomous trade execution aligned with their declared strategy.
Commit History Transparency
All strategy updates must have a consistent and traceable commit history. No traces of manually called APIs.
Screen 2: Portfolio Returns (Leaderboard Qualification)
After screen 1 disqualification, the following Top 20 teams on leaderboard from each region, ranked by portfolio return, will advance for further evaluation.
Portfolio Return is calculated as: (Final Portfolio Value – Initial Portfolio Value) / Initial Portfolio Value
Screen 3: Composite Risk‑Adjusted Performance Score
Qualified teams will be evaluated using a composite risk-adjusted performance score based on three key metrics.
All underlying data, calculations, and results will be transparently published on the Finale Day.
Composite Score Formula:
0.4 × Sortino Ratio
0.3 × Sharpe Ratio
0.3 × Calmar Ratio
Screen 4: Code & Strategy Review
Each shortlisted team’s repository and strategy implementation will undergo technical review.
Evaluation criteria include:
Clear and coherent implementation of trading strategy logic
Clean, well-structured, and properly maintained code repository
Fully runnable continuously with compatibility on the Roostoo platform
Top 5 teams from each region will be selected as finalists from the above screening criteria.
Awards, Educational Fund & Continued Opportunities
There are three award categories: (A) Best Finalist Presentations, (B) Portfolio Performance Rewards, and (C) Winning Region Award.
There will be 3 cash prizes per region, selected based on the above screening criteria and the decision of all judges.
The Winning Region Award will be decided based on the highest average return of each region's top 5 finalist teams.
For teams who build strong, production‑ready repositories and wish to continue developing their strategies:
Continued access to the Roostoo platform
Sponsored cloud infrastructure support
Performance‑based incentives for consistent improvement
Invitation to contribute to an educational trading fund
Valuable CV experience
Potential upside and profit‑sharing opportunities
No downside risk
Total prize pool and education continuity fund reaches ≥ $HKD 80,000/ $AUD 14,235/ ₹INR 973,000
Final Presentation Round
Sponsor and industry judges will apply their own evaluation criteria to select the Top 3 finalist teams in each region who will receive the prizes.
In addition to cash rewards, the top winning teams will gain access to exclusive networking opportunities and potential early assessment opportunities with participating sponsors.
Selected finalist teams will also receive exclusive sponsor swag and prizes.
Competition Rules at a Glance
Open to all HKU, HKUST, CUHK, USYD, UTS, UNSW, IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Roorkee, IIT Guwahati, IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, DTU and DU students
Teams of 1–4 students; one team per participant
Strict anti-plagiarism policy—all submissions must be original
Finalists must verify student status with university ID
All code must be submitted as open-source (GitHub repo)
Organizers reserve final rights on all competition matters
Hackathon Problem Statement
Description:
Develop an AI-driven trading algorithm, or a traditional quantitative rule-based algorithm, or any creative hybrid strategies to compete on Roostoo’s real-time mock exchange backend.
Using the APIs provided in the Roostoo API Documents, your task is to design a trading bot that autonomously makes buy, hold, and sell decisions—without any manual intervention—by interacting with the Roostoo backend exchange engine via POST and GET API requests.
The objective is to maximize portfolio returns while minimizing risk, as measured by portfolio return, Sortino Ratio, Sharpe Ratio, and Calmar Ratio.
Requirements:
Strategies and bot usage are open-ended; there are no limitations or predefined rules. You may use any approach, including LLM models, reinforcement learning algorithms such as PPO agents, traditional trading strategies, or even your own custom solutions built from scratch.
You are welcome to use any data sources. Roostoo platform data is also freely available via API GET requests, as detailed in the documentation. Please note that Roostoo will only cover cloud server costs; any additional data source costs (such as LLM API calls) are not covered.
Roostoo will display bot names on the Roostoo app, creating a live competition leaderboard among teams.
You can track your bot’s performance on the competition leaderboard through our products:
Note: You will not have access to your competition account via the frontend, to prevent manual trades that could compromise the integrity of the competition.
We strongly recommend that you also record all trades and performance logs of your bot internally, and keep track of the success or failure status of each API request.
The competition will run for on AWS cloud infrastructure (provisioned by Roostoo) during the hackathon.
You are required to deploy your bot on an AWS VM and ensure it executes trades automatically on the Roostoo platform.
Rules and Constraints
No high-frequency trading, market-making, or arbitrage strategies are allowed. Excessive server requests will result in failed API responses.
Only spot trading (1x long and short) is permitted on all available financial assets on Roostoo, no leverage.
Each team will be given $100,000 mock portfolio to manage.
Each executed order takes 0.1% commission fee for taker order (market order) and 0.05% for maker order (limit order).
Teams must submit their repositories as open-source for code validation.
Each team will be provided with an AWS sub-account to launch an EC2 instance for hosting your bot on the cloud.
Resources
Luma Page - https://luma.com/coghwiyt
WhatsApp Group for technical and general inquiries - Join WhatsApp Group
Roostoo API - roostoo/Roostoo-API-Documents
AWS Guide - Hackathon Guide: How to Sign In AWS and Launch Your Bot
Hackathon FAQ - Roostoo Quant Trading Hackathon — Official FAQ
Data Resource - Data Sources Pack
How to Get Started
Sign up and team formation: Fill out this form -https://form.typeform.com/to/j3Rza4Ml , you are automatically enrolled in this competition once you submit the form, there will be no confirmation email.
Join Workshop: Join the introduction session and technical workshop on Sep 18, 3pm GMT+8. A Zoom link ( https://hku.zoom.us/j/91941074820?pwd=5ftSbbJCrUF6DIhCUkIfaoL7suRIgk.1) is here. A recording will be provided after the session.
Zoom Recording of Info Session https://hku.zoom.us/rec/share/tNWBgPQ8tK1jrnopEJ6xYW3nW621OSZuenmiOl9idVPhuKkFqcucRx8RSfW_Xvpx.cdEbOdonEdkLqkrr
Central Quants has supported our society over the past year with valuable quant interview-prep resources, helping members secure roles including Quant Research at Dymon Asia and Goldman Sachs, and Graduate Trader positions at Flow Traders.
They are now opening an exclusive waitlist for hackathon participants to access their interview-question database, trading simulations, and preparation support. Scan the QR code or register here: Open Google Form
You can also view a short demo of their platform here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K3dU_66D-mCxFqyub3XW7kqLwoQEoER6/view?usp=sharing
If you’re excited about quantitative trading, live markets, and competing at the highest student level — we’d love to have you.