As announced last week, Metaculus is launching the Trade Signal Tournament tomorrow, in which predictors will forecast 9 economic indicators and other fun finance related questions to compete for a starting prize pool of $1,500.

It is a "starting" prize pool because we've decided to let the community put our money where their mouth is, and trade with the $1,500 portfolio based on the information in the Tournament forecasts.

The idea is obviously to grow the size of the prize, but as a backstop we will guarantee a minimum prize pool of $1000, even if the trades result in the loss of the original $1,500.

To translate the Tournament forecasts into actionable trades, we'll need someone with trading skills. And since we want the whole process to be community-centred, let's elect our first Community Trader!

The Community Trader will need to:

• Have experience in finance and trading.
• Be an at least moderately known Metaculus user in good standing. (As juged by Metaculus Administrators.)
• Advise around 3 major trades a month, and occasionally meet (remotely) with Metaculus staff. We estimate the time investment at several hours a month.

The Community Trader will not make the trades themselves (for obvious legal reasons). Neither will they give their own financial advice, merely translate insights from the Trading Signal Tournaments into potential trades. This is strictly a volunteer position and will come without any present or future financial rewards or benefits.

Election Rules

1. Any user who thinks they would make a good Community Trader, should make a top-level comment below. Please start the comment with the line: "# [username] Candidacy", which should produce a formatted title. Please include a short explanation of your motivations, and what would make you a good translator.

2. Other users are encouraged to ask candidates questions in their candidacy thread, and upvote the top-level comment if they want.

3. On 2021-6-21, a list of candidates will be generated by taking all contenders with a score >= 8 on their top-level comment.

4. All eligible Metaculus users will be invited to vote. Only users who were at least level 2 when this post was published will be eligible.

5. We will use approval voting.

6. The voting will stay open a week (until 2021-06-28 23:59:59 UTC), and the results will be published the next day.

7. The candidate with the most approvals will become our new Community Trader. Ties will be broken by lottery.

8. The Community Trader's term will last until the end of the Trading Signal Tournament, i.e. 2021-09-30.

Important note: Metaculus reserves the right to veto any candidate for any reason. We want these elections to be about and for the community, so we will be very careful with this, and sincerely hope we won't need it, now or ever.