The Bad, The Ugly, and The Good
There are a number of programming contests out there for quants and traders. I’m usually not interested to read more in them because they are usually thinly disguised marketing schemes meant to drive people to a particular platform (e.g., MATLAB, MetaStock).
The Good
There’s a new one out there being organized by Max Dama. Details are available at http://www.quantcup.org/. What I like about this one is that it uses an open language standard (C/C++) and has a well defined API to which the competitors should write their code.
Another thing that’s great about this contest, as compared to some others, is that participants retain IP rights to their code. The organizers do get a non-exclusive license to use it, but that’s reasonable in my view.
the augmented trader 
Q
January 23, 2013
Also one should Check Out, Quantstars.com They run capital tournaments to identify tomorrow’s best trading strategies and they help incubate a select group of strategies.