Contribute

Table of contents

  1. Why become a contributor?
  2. Submission rules
  3. Guidelines
  4. How can you contribute?

Why become a contributor?

Milton Financial Market Research Institute operates an independent publication. We are looking for writers to propose up-to-date content focused on quantitative finance, machine learning and algorithmic trading. If you love to write about these topics, read on!

Publishing on miltonfmr.com and across our distribution channels enables you to reach a broader audience. You also remain the only owner of your work, in accordance with the Medium Terms of Service that you agree to when establishing a Medium account.

Get paid for articles you write.

Send us your article for review. Contributors earn payment based on a calculation of page views, quality score and CPM. See below for more details. Only premium articles (articles that are exclusive to Milton Financial Market Research Institute) are eligible for these payments.

Article Payments

How does Milton Financial Market Research Institute Calculate Article Payments?

Articles are rewarded based on the following factors:

Fixed Payments Based on Supply Scarcity

We offer a fixed payment for articles that focus on a single topic (“high value content”). The longer a topic has had no previous coverage for, the higher the payment for a new article about that topic. For example, an article about “Stock Market Sentiment Analysis using Machine Learning” with no coverage for 15 days will receive an additional fixed payment of $1, and that additional fixed payment rises each day by $1 up to a maximum of $60. Thus, an article about a topic which has had no coverage for 30 days earns an additional fixed payment of $15, an article about a topic which has had no coverage for 45 days earns an additional fixed payment of $30, and an article about a topic which has had no coverage for 75 days or more earns an additional fixed payment of $60.
 

Variable Payments Based on Consumption by Paid Subscribers

A variable payment is calculated based on how many Premium subscribers read your article. We set an overall budget each month and divide it into an allocated budget for each subscriber. Each subscriber’s “budget” is then distributed to authors proportionally based on how many articles that subscriber read during the month. The more your articles are read by Premium subscribers, the more money you will earn. We plan to increase the overall budget over time as our subscriber-base grows.

Notes

  • Only articles which are exclusive to Milton Financial Market Research Institute are eligible for payments.
  • Top Idea articles are excluded from this calculation (absolute exclusion). They receive a fixed payment of $600.
  • Additional bonus payments are offered for exclusive content which is only available to our highest tier of subscribers. Bonuses range from $50 to $250. 
  • Subscriber page views are counted from all platforms (desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps).
  • We retain the right to change the fixed payment time-frame and amount at any time.
  • Payments are finalized at the end of each month. However, an estimated payment is shown mid-month for variable payments. The final number may be higher depending on subscriber readership during the remaining days of the month.
  • There is a grace period for publishing an article on the same topic which had a recently published article. If the submission time of the article is within 72 hours of the publish time of the other article, it will still be eligible for 80% of the payment.

Reach a broader audience with your articles.

Also, here are a few things we do to ensure your articles reach the largest audience possible:

  • We feature our best content on our publication’s pages and social media: Linkedin, Twitter, Blog, Medium.
  • We send weekly and monthly newsletters that feature stories and writers.
  • Our best authors are regularly invited to join our team.

Earn money through the Research Partner Program. Writers can choose to enter into a research agreement and implement their research with buy-side asset management clients.

Writers keep 100% of the earnings they earn through their research for buy side asset management clients as part of the Research Partner Program.

You will remain the only owner of your work and will be able to edit it at any moment, even after we have published it. The feedback our editors and community provide will appear at the relevant places in your article. You will be able to dismiss or respond to them.

Submission rules

Before submitting your article, there are a few essential things you need to know. Make sure you read each point well, and that you understand them, as by submitting an article to miltonfmr.com and medium.com, you are agreeing to comply with all of them.

  1. Medium’s Rules and Terms of Service apply to Algorithmic Trading Research (ATR) as it is a Medium publication. Make sure you read it before submitting your article.
  2. As explained in Medium’s Terms of Service, you own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium and therefore Algorithmic Trading Research. You’re also responsible for the content you post. This means you assume all risks related to it, including someone else’s reliance on its accuracy, or claims relating to intellectual property or other legal rights.
  3. We have adopted Medium’s Content Guidelines and Medium’s Curation Guidelines for every article we publish. This means that if your post isn’t of a high enough quality to be curated or doesn’t follow the guidelines, we won’t publish it on Algorithmic Trading Research nor on miltonfmr.com.
  4. Please don’t submit more than two stories in a single day. Any more than three submissions will be refused without reading. You’re welcome to resubmit them in the future.
  5. You can edit and remove your article from our publication at any time.
  6. We might directly edit your content to correct basic spelling mistakes and update minimal formatting. Also, we might remove images where the source isn’t clearly stated. Copyright violation is a real thing and could happen to you. It is your responsibility to ensure you own or have a legal right to use, all content, images, and videos you include in your articles.
  7. We can remove any articles you post on Algorithmic Trading Research or miltonfmr.com for any reason. If we do so, your content will not be lost but still hosted on Medium.com and redirected there.
  8. If our editorial team finds one or more violations of our rules, we can remove you and all of your articles from our publication and report them to Medium.

Guidelines

How to get your article ready for publication!

We aim to strike a balance between innovating, informing and philosophizing. We want to hear from you! But we do ask that if you are not a professional writer, you consider the following points when you prepare your article. We want to publish high quality, professional articles that people want to read.

Please be aware that if you don’t follow our submission guidelines, your article won’t be accepted.

1. Is your story a story that needs to be told?

Before you start writing, ask yourself: is this story a story that needs to be told?

If you have read many articles addressing the same issue or explaining the same concept, think twice before writing another one. If you have a radical, new take on an old chestnut, we want to hear from you… but, we need you to persuade us that your article is something special that distinguishes itself from the pack and speaks to our audience.

Conversely, if your article addresses an underserved area or presents a new idea or method, that’s just what we are after!

2. What is your message?

Let us know what your ‘take home message’ is, right from the start. Give your piece a snappy introduction that tells us:

  • What is your novel idea?
  • Why should we care?
  • How are you going to prove your point?

Once you’ve got that out of the way, you can be as conversational as you like, but keep calling back to the central message and give us a solid conclusion.

👆Remember though keep it sharp and on-topic!

3. On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog

You’ve got a new idea or a new way of doing things, you want to tell the community and start a discussion. Fantastic, that’s what we want too, but we’re not going to take for granted that you know what you are talking about or that we should uncritically believe what you say… you’ve got to persuade us (your audience) that:

  • The subject matter is important
  • There is a gap that needs to be filled
  • You have the answer
  • Your solution works
  • Your idea is based on a logical progression of ideas and evidence
  • If you are giving us a tutorial, tell us why people would need to use this tool and why your way is better than the methods already published.

You can do this by explaining the background, showing examples, providing an experiment or just laying out how data you have extracted from various sources allowed you to synthesize this new idea.

Are there arguments that counter your opinion or your findings? Explain why that interpretation conflicts with your idea and why your idea comes out on top.

4. Do you have a short title with an insightful subtitle?

If you scroll up this page you will see what a title looks like. It needs to tell potential readers why they should read your post. Overall, your header is useful for making your aims clear to readers.

Also, when your subtitle is directly under the headline and it’s formatted as H2 it will show up in some post previews which helps with click-through rate.

5. What value do you deliver to your readers?

☝Make sure your post achieves its purpose. For instance, if your goal is to explain several concepts, ensure that these concepts are bared to their essentials, narrated in an orderly sequence and illustrated with simple and accurate analogies.

✌Second, use concrete language and visual imagery.

🤟Third, work to improve your writing skills. You could start by replacing linking and light verbs such as ‘to be, is, going, become, bring, make, take, have’, by more precise action verbs. For example, you could say ‘agile’ instead of ‘going fast’. There is plenty of great advice on the internet.

✍Finally, check for spelling, punctuation and grammatical mistakes. If you can’t do it yourself, use Grammarly and then ask a friend to help you. As we are such a small team, we can’t correct every submission.

6. Is your code well displayed?

Please don’t screenshot your code but use one of these two other solutions:

If you paste a code within your article, be sure to explain it so all your readers can follow what you are doing.

7. Check your facts

Whenever you provide a fact, if it’s not self-evident, let us know where you learned it. Tell us who your sources are and where your data originated. If we want to have a conversation we all need to be on the same page. Maybe something you say will spark a discussion, but if we want to be sure we are not at cross purposes, we need to go back to the original and read for ourselves in case we are missing a vital piece of the puzzle that makes everything you say make sense.

8. Is your conclusion to the point and not promotional?

You can use your conclusion to link the original post and even a few relevant articles but please avoid requesting for claps or having many links to your previously published articles. Your readers know that they can click on your profile to see all your posts. They also know that they can follow you, so there is no need to request it. In case of research inquiry from buy-side asset management clients we will inform you by email.

For your references, please respect this format:

[X] N. Name, Title (Year), Source

For example, your first reference should look like this:

[1] A. Pesah, A. Wehenkel and G. Louppe, Recurrent Machines for Likelihood-Free Inference (2018), NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Meta-Learning

9. Are your tags precise enough?

The more specific your tags, the easier it is for readers to find your article and for us to classify and recommend your post to the relevant audience.

Depending on the tags you choose, your post will be featured on of our pages. Please choose precise tags as we can’t allow a post to be in all our categories at once.

We may change one or two tags before publication. We would do this only to keep our different sections relevant to our readers. For instance, we would want to avoid tagging a post on portfolio optimization as “Artificial Intelligence”.

10. Do you have an amazing image?

A great image attracts and excites readers. That’s why all the best newspapers always display incredible pictures.

This is what you can do to add a fantastic featured image to your post:

  • Take one yourself. Your phone is almost certainly good enough to capture a cool image of your surroundings. You might even already have an image on your phone that would make a great addition to your article.
  • Make a great graph. If your post involves data analysis, spend some time making at least one graph truly unique. You can try R, Python, D3.js or even Plotly.
  • Spend $2 to $5. Many websites now sell good stock photos. You can try sites like Photodune, Shuttershock, Istockphotos, depositphotos and more.
  • Use Unsplash. Most of the content on Unsplash is released under Creative Commons CC0, which means their photos are safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist — even for commercial purposes.

Please remember to cite the source of your images even if you aren’t legally obligated to do so. If you created an image yourself, you can add (Image by author) in the caption. Whichever way you decide to go, your image source should look like this:

Your image should both have the source and the link to that source. If you created an image yourself, you can add “Image by author”.

Danger zone 🚩

Do not use images (including logos and gifs) you found online without explicit permission from the owner. Adding the source to an image doesn’t grant you the right to use it.

Except for content released in the Public Domain (like this), if you don’t have a license or a written confirmation, you need to ask the owner of the image for permission or replace the image with one you definitely have the right to use.

Please be aware that copyright violation is a real thing and could happen to you.

11. Have you respected Medium’s guidelines?

We have adopted Medium’s curation guidelines for every article we publish. This means that if your post isn’t of a high enough quality to be curated or doesn’t follow the curation guidelines, we won’t publish it on miltonfmr.com or medium.com.

12. Did you get any feedback before submitting your post?

Get into the habit of always asking a friend for feedback before publishing your article. Having worked so hard on that article, you wouldn’t want to let a silly mistake push readers away.

13. Has your Medium profile been completed correctly?

Please include your real name and/or company name, a photo, and a bio. We don’t publish posts from anonymous people. If you want us and your readers to trust you, you have to reveal who you are.

How do you submit an article?

To become a writer, please send your article using our form. Please note that we work on Medium and miltonfmr.com. We don’t proofread articles published on your blog, a PDF, or a google doc. Also, we cannot guarantee a reply to every article submission due to the volume of submissions we receive.

  • While we have an open submission policy, we do not accept or publish all articles submitted to us. We cannot guarantee a reply to every email due to the volume we receive.
  • Please note that we only work on Medium and miltonfmr.com. We don’t proofread articles published on your blog, a PDF, or a google doc.
  • We only publish articles that follow Medium’s curation guidelines.
  • Please include your resume or a link to your LinkedIn profile in your email.
  • Use your professional or academic email address. It helps us to verify your profile and resume.

Finally, once you have published your first article with us, we will add you to the ATR Medium and miltonfmr.com publication team as a contributor and you will be able to submit subsequent articles directly through Medium or miltonfmr.com.