About Minimum Capital Deployed

The goal of C2Star is to encourage the development of strategies with tight risk control, low beta, and high alpha... which can be used by real-world investors.

Strategies which seldom trade do not meet customer needs. Investors will need to allocate capital to them, and get little in return.

Therefore we enforce a Minimum Capital Deployment requirement. Basically, you need to risk an average of 1% of your capital over time.

Note that this is an average. One way of achieving this average would be to take 1% of your Model Account, and "deploy" it into a trade on Day 1, and leave that trade open forever.

Another way would be to open exactly one trade each day that uses 24% of your capital, and leave it open for one hour, and then close it.

Obviously these are extreme examples designed to explain the concept. In general, almost any strategy that trades in a real way (i.e. that does not attempt to "game" the program) will easily meet this performance requirement. The requirement does not become enforced until Day 30 of the program, so you will have plenty of time to see your Capital Deployment Rate, and make any needed adjustments.

Capital Deployments for each financial instrument type

• If you buy one share of stock for $100, you "deploy" $50 worth of your account, for as long as the position is open. (i.e. We assume 50% margin usage).
• If you buy 1 minilot of forex, you "deploy" 10,000 of the base currency multiplied by 3% (i.e. We assume 33:1 leverage for forex trades).
• If you buy 1 futures contract, you "deploy" the initial margin for that contract.

Whether a position is long or short is immaterial. We add up all deployed capital for each period of time, and average it across the lifetime of your strategy.

Closed Trades and Minimum Capital Deployment

In addition to requiring that strategies generally deploy capital over time, C2Star requires also that strategies build a track record of visible, closed positions. (Only fully-closed trades are visible to people who are not yet subscribers.)

How do we measure whether a sufficient track record of closed trades has been built? We do not simply count the number of closed trades, as that would incentivize managers to quickly close a series of meaningless trades. Rather, we measure the capital deployment of closed trades over time. Basically, we use the same measurement technique described above, but count only trades that have been fully closed towards the minimum requirement.

The percentage requirement deployed in closed trades may be different than the overall capital-deployment percentage requirement.