re: % vs. absolute gains.
It's the old question: who is the "better" trader? The guy who made a profit of 200% over some time span, but is trading with trivial amounts, or the one who manages to squeeze out a meager, say, 50% over the same time, but did so with a much bigger position.
In "real life", cost of trading factors in heavily, so the two types are sort of incomparable: if trader (a) manages to sustain those huge profits on his small position long enough, he will eventually get to the size of trader (b), in which case they become comparable.
Meh, long story for what I actually want to say: since this is a zero trading cost game (which is fine, it just means it rewards trading often slightly more than real life), and you can trade your (virtual) position identically whether it's 1 BTC or 1000, I'm actually thinking the default order should be percentage gain anyway. (and, no, doesn't make a difference for me personally. I won't be among the first 10 in either case
)
(EDIT) wait... how about:
(current position, USD value - starting position, USD value) / starting position, USD value = relative gains
(current date - starting date of player) in days = playing time
(relative gains / playing time)*365 = annualized relative gains of player <= default sorting order
Someone look over it to see if I made a mistake, bit of a brain fog day....nevermind, it's BS
(EDIT 2) Top 20 if ordered by relative gains (which also happens to be the set of all players with a USD profit currently)
I'll start by saying, there can never be a 'best' ranking. I think the system, as you have it, works great.
Invariably, different people will look at the same data and come to different conclusions. The metric you have - total value (normalized for variable entry times) is about as pure as you can get.
Disclaimer aside, there has been _something_ nagging at me. I went back and read oda's strikethrough, and was amused to see he was starting down the same path I'm going to propose.
The problem?
All these new guys keep coming up to the top, and in a few days, knocks us veterans down in the list.
...except that is not really a problem at all - it is the perfectly expected outcome, given the nature of trading. Most traders lose money. The good ones don't _typically_ go posting all their trades publicly, except when posturing.
Naturally, we are all trying to make a profit in the game. But in the long run, on the average, most traders will lose.
It naturally follows that new players will tend to be in the upper rankings, simply because they have not yet played.
One (additional, non-primary) metric that could be valuable is the average rate of change of the size of our holdings per month.
An example.
30 players start on day 1.
20 more players start on day 32.
At the end of two months, we now have 50 players, 30 have played 2 months, 20 have played 1 month. That makes 80 months of game time. Let us say cumulatively that 30 players make 5%, and the other 20 players lose 10%. All told, the average rate of loss per month is -1% (+150%, -200%, net -50, divided by 50 players.)
This value would be calculated, because each individual player only needs three facts, all of which we already have: Their start date, their start value, and their current value.
This allows us to output a derived value for individual rate of change per month.
The raw data can be summed for the playerbase-as-a-whole rate of change.
And of course, just to make it hurt, we could include a few other metrics to compare against, such as:
-The Ultimate HODLER - A rate of change of 0% never doing anything.
-The Blind Squirrel - A random coin-flip decides each day whether to reverse positions or hold.
-Your own trading account's rate of change over time.
