Automated Trading Championship – Rules that are hard to understand

It is important to understand all the rules of MetaQuotes’s annual Automated Trading Championship. Last year’s rules are found here.

One of the most difficult rule to understand is under Trading Terms #4.

“The minimum trade size is 0.1 lot, the maximum one is 5 lots with the step of 0.1 lot for each order.”

Here is a breakdown of what it means:

1. There is only one decimal place for lot size ie 0.2, 1.3, 2.4, etc. You cannot place lots with 2 decimal places ie 0.12, 1.32, etc

2. The smallest lot size allowable is 0.1.

3. The largest lot size is 5.0.

4. “step of 0.1 for each order” means you can place a lot with 1 decimal place as in point 1. It does not mean that after you place a lot size of 0.1, the next lot size allowable is 0.2. No, it just means use one decimal place.

I think this is the most difficult rule to understand, the rest seems pretty straightforward. However, there are two more that may disqualify you from participation. Under Participants, rule #5 and #6

#5. The Participant can be registered only once within the Championship. Registration of your friends or relatives instead of you will result in your disqualification. If any registered persons display their ignorance of trading, they will be disqualified.

#6. The attempts of multiple registrations or use of anonymous proxies will result in unambiguous disqualification of the Participant.

These two rules are to prevent multiple entries by a single person, who uses other people’s names for registration. I think the organisers detect this by checking for submission of EA entries from the same computer. There are always dispute over this but to avoid any misunderstandings, it is best to submit from your own computer and let no one else use your computer to submit theirs. After all, if your friend is in automated trading, he or she should have their own computer and connections to be fiddling with EAs! Apart from detecting where the submission source is, I do not know how else this can be checked.

Automated Trading Championships – Rules for Efficiency

The Automated Trading Championships (ATC) organised by MetaQuotes is attracting more and more participants each year. Some rules of the competition may seem peculiar at first glance but they are there for good reasons.

Servers efficiency is important to handle the increasing number of EA submissions. As CPU resources are precious and limited, Expert Advisors (EA) need to be efficient in the utilisation of these resources including disk space. For a start, errors are not tolerated because they will increase the server load and errors will repeatedly waste important CPU resources and disk space. Many of these errors are often overlooked because we are not affected by them in trading, live or demo – at least we thought.

Once the competition starts, you have no control over your EA and if it does not behave, your EA will be disqualified. One example is the issuing of orders when your account does not have enough money. In real life, we would have just unplug the EA and not let it deplete our account. In the competition, you have no control and you need to handle such situations in your coding. Let’s run through some of the errors.

1. Not enough money

Use AccountFreeMaginCheck with the lot size you intend to check against your Free Margin before sending out your orders. If there is not enough money, reduce the lot size. Of course, if your account has blown and the smallest lot volume is not even possible to issue, then keep looping your EA until the competition is over.

2. Handling Requotes

Do a RefreshRates and check if your order succeed and repeat this until your order is sent successfully. RefreshRates gets you new price quotes to work on.

3. EA takes too long to run

After you have submitted your EA, the organiser will run your EA from the start of the current year to the date of testing. And your EA should take less than 10 seconds to complete. If not, your codes are not efficient. One CPU resource sucker is the multiple ifs statement. So instead of using

if (A>B && B<C && C==D)

change it to

if(A>B) if(B<C) if(C==D)

I am sure there are many other errors and taking the effort to remove these errors will improve your EA efficiency. Perhaps these little steps will get your EA to do the right thing at the right time when used in real trading.

Automated Trading Championship

The Automated Trading Champion (ATC) is a contest by the maker of metatrader to encourage the use of automated trading through their platform. Started in 2006, the interest in this championship has grown tremendously. In 2006, there were only 258 qualified participants. In 2008, it has grown to 705. The results is even more impressive. Give a starting equity of $10K, the winner in 2006 grew his account to $35K. Then in 2007, the winner had a balance of $130K. But in 2008, the winner won the competition at $169K. The table below summarises what has happened over the past three years.

What is even more interesting is that the number of participants who could grow their accounts to more than the equity given is a vey small percentage. Less than 20%of the participants were able to grow their accounts; the majority were not able to win a cent. There are many reasons, I am sure. It is only a competition using demo accounts and no real money is used. The participation is free and so there is no pain on the side of the participants except developing a trading strategy and coding the ideas into an EA. This environment will drive the behaviour of the trading strategies used by the participants. As the championship grows in numbers and increasing balance obtained, the EAs will only get more aggressive and risky. Most participants will risk all their capital to forge ahead, something that most will not do in real life and with real money.

Perhaps it is time to change the competition's requirement so that more realistic EAs will be written. After all, many people are interested to use the EAs in real accounts and want to buy them from the owners. Nothing wrong with this. The sad aspect is that most of the winners turned losers after the competition. And we are taken for another ride...

	2006	2007	2008
Total Registered Participants	753	2011	2420
Total Qualified Participants	258	603	705
Total above USD10K	44	91	128
Highest Balance (USD)	35,175.56	130,475.45	169,584.64