I did not have much leg space last week to respond to a few...

I did not have much leg space last week to respond to a few posters – not an easy-going week at all that was.

First and foremost, thanks for your kind words@Freehold. IMHO, credit for reviving the STTCOMP should go to @ammie and few other regulars. I was called for the ‘service’ and I am just helping them out. Also, thanks for the appreciation of how this additional workload by the competition impacts my own works. It is mostly my own system development that has been adversely impacted by this currently ; however, I am glad that I can contribute to the forum . As I have said a few times before, STT forum is where I learnt a lot about trading strategies and techniques and gathered most of my stock trading knowledge, and it also helped me a lot in shaping up my system to its current form.

I know how difficult it had been for Free to lift the STTCOMP to the current level over years. If the new tipsters could go and read the older forums (you do not need go far, just read threads from 2014/15) and I am pretty sure you will realise the great and continuous efforts made by Free & Co. in shaping the competition up to the current standards. Compared to then, life is much easier now in terms of handling the tip submissions, so I cannot complain.

I understand @bosco222 has been having some difficult times with your personal circumstances. We all have rough times in our lives every now and then – the most important thing is to keep your head up in such situations. I hope everything is sorted by now, your missus doing well, and wish you will be back in the STTCOMP 2.0 with your great picks. And, congratulations for wearing the three jerseys for three consecutive weeks, Bosco.

A kind request for the tipsters too – please try to stick with the standard header template, which makes everyone’s life easier. Our system already incorporates measures to handle common errors, however, please do not take error handling for granted. The system has been developed based on the rules and guidelines, and if you do not comply, please do not blame the program. Every error you make costs time of someone else’s, by means of code changes, correction requests, etc., and more importantly wastes valuable forum space. I am happy to continually improve the codes as required, but end of the day, picking up the tips, collection of market data, calculations and preparation of reports have to be 100% automated (which has been achieved now). I do not think I am going to manually enter tips under any circumstance; it is simply not sustainable for me in the longer term.

I am running my own trading strategy which I think is unique in some aspects, or at least very uncommon (but yet to prove its success). TBH, the tipping competition has no bearing on my own short listing, stock selections or buying decisions, though I can highly appreciate that some of the tips have been great picks, and some tipsters (including previous leaders of the comp) have been superb in picking up the runners. In short, by helping in running the competition, I gain nothing but enjoying contributing to the forum. Having said that, I should also say that I continue to learn technicals and fundamentals through each and every bit of this great forum.

@Lambrae, I am hoping that we can include Mountain Climbers Competition too without much drama. I just need to setup a template and a few codes. However, I am not sure if you were referring to Genuine Re-Rates Competition, for which I have more works to do including restructuring parts of the database to store daily market caps. Either way, I would like to see if there is enough demand for (or use of) these extensions, probably a question for @ammie and other forum regulars.

A heads up about the rule on minimum number of tips to qualify – From the 1st of April 2019, the minimum tips required to qualify for 12m rankings will revert to the original cap of 10 tips. This could possibly change current positions or even more jerseys could become ‘non-awarded’ if the minimum number of qualified players for each jersey is not achieved. Hope the tipsters will have enough time to take actions, if deemed practical, to mitigate any impact by this change over. Or otherwise, could we extend 5 tips temporary cap for another few months until we get a few players go pass 10 tips, say until 1st July? Any thoughts, @ammie @Wazza3006 and others?

Sorry about the long post. Wish everyone a great week ahead!