The bounded-loss policy that governs every position in this course, plus the course-wide rules for late work, extensions, integrity and getting help.
Policies and support#
The loss requirement is bounded#
This course requires documented losses. It does not require you to be out of pocket, and it caps what you can lose if you choose to be.
The default is a paper position. Every student is issued a paper account with a notional balance of $10,000. Nothing is deposited and nothing can be withdrawn. Losses on this track are recorded in dollars and percentages so that one student’s position can be compared with another’s, which is what makes the week 12 ledger readable.
Real money is an opt-in track with a hard cap of $20 for the semester. You set the amount once, in the first session, and it is never topped up. If you lose all of it in week 3, you spend the remaining nine weeks on the paper track and nothing about your mark changes.
On the real-money track, positions must be long-only and fully paid. You buy a thing, you own the thing, and the most you can lose is what you paid. No margin, no borrowing, no short positions, no uncovered derivatives, no product whose loss can exceed the amount you put in.
That last rule is the one that makes the cap a cap. A $20 limit means nothing if the instrument can take $200 off you, and there are instruments that can. This is also why week 5 runs as a paper exercise: leverage is the one failure mode on the syllabus whose downside is not bounded by what you deposited, so the course teaches the arithmetic and refuses the position.
If your paper account and your real account disagree about what happened, the paper account is the one the assessments read.
What you have to write down#
Both assessments are marked on a position record, not on an outcome. A loss you cannot reconstruct is worth nothing here, and a loss of $4 that you can account for to the cent is worth more than a loss of $400 you cannot.
The formats are on the records page: the opening record you file in the first session, and the position log you keep from then on. Use them. Thirty students inventing thirty formats is thirty sets of arithmetic that cannot be checked against each other.
Withdrawing a position#
You may close any position at any time, for any reason, including that you have stopped enjoying it. Closing early does not cost you marks; the record of why you closed is itself assessable material, and “I could not sleep” is a finding about position sizing.
You may also move from the real-money track to the paper track at any point in the semester. You cannot move the other way after the first session.
Late work and extensions#
Work submitted after the deadline without an extension loses 5% of the available marks per day, counted in whole days, to a floor of zero at twenty days.
Extensions are granted for the usual reasons — illness, misadventure, carer responsibilities — and are requested from the convenor before the deadline where that is possible and as soon as possible where it is not. You do not need to supply a diagnosis. A market that moved against you is not grounds for an extension; that is the subject of the course.
Academic integrity#
The position record has to be yours. Fabricating a trade, a price or a fill is the one thing in this course that cannot be fixed by a better write-up, because the entire premise is that the numbers on the page happened to the person who wrote them.
Declare any assistance, including software that generated or checked your arithmetic. Working with other students on the mechanics is expected; the week 12 ledger only functions if people talk to each other. The account of your own positions is written alone.
Getting help#
For anything about a position, the sessions are the fastest route — bring the log. For anything about marks, extensions or the course itself, email the convenor. Both are listed on the people page.
If a position is affecting your sleep, your finances or your health, close it and email the convenor. There is nothing in this course that is worth that, and the paper track exists precisely so that this sentence has a remedy attached to it.