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