The Trading Competitions for me only make sense with some principles :
- Real Money
- Same Brokerage Company
- Same Initial Amount
- 2 Categories : Manual Trading | Automated Trading
- At least 6 Months of Competition - Best is 1 year
This way, imho you really see who are the real traders, real systems that work in "all" market stages, and most important at least for me, the money management applied to handle such period.
The competions of 1 month have no meaning for me at least - you can have a range month and a martingale strategy will make thousands of pips, in other hand of you have a trend month, trend following systems will be king, so a larger period ( min 6 month, preferable 1 year ) will show real power of system / trader to handle different market stages.
Regards,