From Prosperity to IMC Internship: Anant Consul's Journey

Anant Consul is a student at ISI-Kolkata and the winner of IMC Prosperity 3 -IMC's annual global trading challenge. He didn't get there on his first attempt.

Anant participated in Prosperity 1 and 2, learning and levelling up each time before finally winning the coveted title in Prosperity 3.

That win gave him the opportunity to interview at IMC, which he cleared, landing himself an internship.

We spoke to Anant about his three-year Prosperity journey, what he learned along the way, and why he thinks every student should give it a shot...

How it started

Anant first came across Prosperity through LinkedIn. He was already curious about quant trading and was exploring what the world of trading actually looked like.

He'd looked at competitions on Kaggle and elsewhere, but found them either too far removed from real trading or focused purely on machine learning. "Prosperity was the only thing which brought us to actual market making and arbitrage," he says.

Three editions, three levels

What makes Anant's story stand out is that he didn't win Prosperity on his first attempt -or even his second.

In Prosperity 1, he was, by his own admission, naive. "It was mostly about telling me what the roadblocks were," he says. He realised he was weak in Python, wasn't writing clean scripts, and hadn't built the kind of tooling that would make things easier.

Prosperity 2 went better. His team put up a strong fight, though a few things didn't go their way. By Prosperity 3, they came in prepared -with extensive tooling, better automation, and the lessons of two previous editions behind them.

"The main learning happened between 1 and 2 -understanding what I couldn't do, what we couldn't do, and what could have been done. Mostly learning from the mistakes."

Keep it simple

One of the biggest takeaways from Anant's experience is about simplicity. Rather than building something complex that might break or be hard to understand, he found that simple, robust tools worked far better.

"Having simple predictions and simple tools which are very robust is way better than having something complicated which might break down," he says. "Combining small tools can help you a lot -small pragmatic things along your way."

Don't give up when things get hard

When asked about the most challenging part of Prosperity, Anant didn't point to a specific round or concept. For him, the hardest part was mental.

"The most challenging part was not giving up when you're actually down the leaderboard. Keep pushing through it, keep finding patterns, and try going through ideas. Either they work out, or they don't -just keep doing that and don't lose that hope."

Pick a team that won't quit

Anant is clear about what makes a good Prosperity team -and it's less about skill and more about commitment.

"Have a team that you can trust. They're going to have your back when things get hard," he says. "Have people who will actually put in the effort, not treat it like some low-priority thing. They have this as a top-priority for at least those days."

His other advice: divide tasks well, hold each other accountable, and don't over-rely on AI.

What Prosperity taught him

Through three editions of Prosperity, Anant built a grounded understanding of how trading actually works -market making, arbitrage, how liquidity is provided, and how microstructure edges can be used to trade.

But beyond the technical, he also learned to collaborate with a team, build better automation, and approach problems pragmatically.

His message to students

"It's a fun event. Even if you don't do very well, you will learn a lot about this industry," Anant says. His practical advice: learn a bit of Python beforehand and check out past repos to understand how things work.

Beyond that, keep it simple: "Have fun during this event. Take it seriously a bit. Put in some effort, and things might turn out well for you."

If Anant's journey shows anything, it's that persistence pays off -and sometimes it takes more than one try to find your winning edge.