The October strategy competition is open for entries

A quieter week in the app and a busy one on the competition. Here's what changed.

Setting risk limits from Claude no longer breaks the home page

If you asked Claude to set your risk limits before you'd finished setup in the app, the home page could crash when you opened it. Now the app fills in anything the chat didn't set with PTQ's defaults as your profile loads. Set your limits from Claude whenever you like and the app opens normally. Limits set from the chat don't count as finishing setup, so you can still go through it in the app.

Every screen is now tested against the half-filled profile the chat leaves behind, so this one stays fixed.

The October competition is open

Once a month you can enter one strategy. It locks when you submit it, then it's tracked forward on simulated money for the whole month. No real trades are placed. The ranking is the month's return divided by its biggest drop, so taking more risk doesn't move you up on its own.

October's entries close on 1 October at 00:00 US Central time, which is 06:00 UK, 01:00 New York and 15:00 Sydney. Dates, markets, how entries are simulated and the $500 prize for first place are all in the round notice, and the full rules are here.

Who can enter:

• Part-Time Quant Academy members, through the invite link in the Academy. It makes you an account that's only for the competition.
• Anyone with a paid PTQ subscription, from the same login.

A public leaderboard

The leaderboard is open to anyone, no sign-in. It shows positions and names only. You see your own strategy's simulated results in your competition account, and nobody sees anyone else's numbers. It's also linked from the footer of every page.

Every entry is measured on every bar of the month, so the standings can update through the day.

Entering is clearer

• The builder's button now says "Next: submit your entry".
• Only the round currently taking entries is offered, and it's already selected.
• Before you submit, the confirm screen tells you what locking means. Afterwards you get a link to the leaderboard.
• The competition page has the Report a problem button too.

If you report something

Reports go into the same queue as before. If one needs more detail before we can fix it, you may get an email from PTQ Support. That's an AI assistant working for Lewis. It asks what went wrong and what fixed would look like, and it sends four emails at most. Anything about billing, refunds, your account or security goes straight to Lewis.

Fixes made from your reports now go in this changelog each week, without names.

Fixes

• Academy members could see "membership verification is temporarily unavailable" on the competition page. The member list now updates every hour. Fixed.
• Buying Premium in the Academy now gets you a PTQ key within the hour, without anyone having to step in.
• The Academy tools could fetch crypto and forex prices from the wrong source on Day 3. The Day 1 prompt now installs the fixed tools.
• The Jev trading loop prompt now builds its state from real price history, retries a locked file on Windows, and says clearly that on Alpaca it runs long or flat. A sell closes the position. It can't open a short. It still trades paper by default.

If something in the competition doesn't make sense, or there's something you want PTQ to do next, tell us.