[dunster]

We work very hard to make our interests aligned with our community members' interests. We don't literally make money from the algorithms in the contest. What we're doing is encouraging hundreds and thousands of new people to write algorithms. The best ones will be invited to join our hedge fund, we'll negotiate compensation with them, and we'll take investment from pension funds and endowments and the like. In that sense - yes, when our customers win, we win too.

As for the judging, I think you'll find it be very transparent. There are 6 return and risk metrics calculated for both the backtest and the paper trading. The 6 metrics are weighted equally to generate an overall score. You can see the metrics for every contestant and the combined score on the leaderboard. You can verify it all by downloading the CSV. https://www.quantopian.com/leaderboard