The first month of the long-term and promising project "Dukascopy trader contest" came to an end on December, 31th and now we are glad to announce the Dukascopy evaluations and unveil the final standings.

Observing the opening stage of the new contest has been very exciting, especially looking at its rapid growth and the activity emerging around it. Apart from ascertaining the initial expectations about the potential of the competition, December brought lots of valuable insights into improvements and the new features which need to be implemented in the contest. Some of those have already been added, yet there is still a list of planned amendments to be carried out in the near future which will bring more convenience and utility to our participants.

The rules of the contest will see some improvements compared to the first month. The evident disproportions and trading strategies of certain traders (e.g. huge lots of some traders) are forcing us to implement a new limitation on the maximum lot size, which will be applied very soon. The maximum trade will provisionally be limited to 5 million currency units in the base currency (e.g. 5 mio EUR for EUR/USD, 5 mio USD for USD/CHF etc). The respective automatic validation will be implemented in the contest trading platform.

The second problematic area that currently impedes the contest's content from moving to the desired direction are the comments posted by participants. Unfortunately, on average the quality of comments is still insufficient and scarcely can claim to be analytical or helpful. Comments like "Buy", "OK" etc. still represent a considerable share of the blog, which is unacceptable if one wants to qualify for a prize position. We remind that Dukascopy reserves the right to penalize poor comments by putting low Dukascopy evaluation points, which may offset the otherwise successful positioning of the trader in the contest standings. And vice versa, we will give additional credits to those posting meaningful and interesting justifications. The latter was done already for the December, where one of the leading traders (_heven) received the maximum points from Dukascopy for his qualitative comments.

We remind that all in accordance with the published guidelines, the Dukascopy evaluation points were credited basing on 4 factors:

1. Risk/reward ratio (Average ratio of TPs to SLs)
2. % of positions opened by pending orders
3. % of positions closed at market
4. Evaluation of comments quality and general activity of the contestant (Extra bonuses are awarded in this category for the most informative and analytically-grounded traders).

The second month of the contest is now running and the number of registrations gives us strong grounds to believe that it will be more popular than the 1^st one and brings serious incentives to further develop and improve the contest.

New functions and features are on the way. Some of those are:

• Trading statistics added to every profile page
• Possibility to add free format posts to your trading blog
• Possibility to edit your profile information and add descriptions of your trading strategies etc.
• Sharing of individual posts
• etc.

Finally, we highly recommend that traders read the short comments written by Dukascopy on all ten winners. We believe that they might be valuable for the understanding of the contest's priorities and may convey some hints on the possible ways of improvement for every participant.

Good luck in your trades and keep following the contest!

Your Dukascopy trader contest support