Thursday, June 2, 2011

ATC2011 - Here we go again

MetaQuotes announced the 2011 Automated Trading Championship. Apart from changes in sponsors, everything looks pretty much the same.

I will be submitting the same EA as last year which was placed 56, my best perfomance so far in this series of competition. It gained a profit of $3500. The EA hardly traded because of some hiccups when the servers were reset.


I don't have much time this year and hopefully the same EA can trade more often and have its performance validated. I kept the demo version running till today and it is currently at $240K from its initial $10K in Jul 2010.


Thursday, December 16, 2010

Alpari FX Contest – I’m out.

The Contest had ended. I am out of the league table; that means the overall equity had fallen below $100K. One mistake I have learnt. Running 2 EAs in the same account. I usually don’t run more than 1 EA in an account, be it live or demo. In this case, I was trying to increase trading opportunities as this contest is over a short period. The first EA is rather idle and I thought the second EA will the gaps.

I forgot to include magic numbers in the closing routine and the two EAs messed each other up; and one EA traded higher lots when there are previous losses and so cumulate up more losses.

Monday, November 22, 2010

2010G – no trades at ATC2010

This is indeed baffling. 2010G has just taken 1 trade after a server reset and went silent thereafter. In contrast, the same EA running off MetaQuotes demo servers (non-championship servers) over the same period are firing orders and progressing upwards. From the last blog which showed a forward test from 2 Jul 2010 to 29Sep 2010 and with a equity gained at $102,926 (started at $10K), the current equity is now $162,000.

20Nov2010

But at the ATC2010, only trade (21 deals at 0.1 lot) was fired once, gaining a profit of $3252.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Alpari FX Contest – I am in!

Alpari has introduced some fun to us by offering FX contest using demo $ – which means another no risk competition. It started on 7 November 2010 at 23:00 GMT (Sunday) and will end on 10 December 2010 at 22:00 GMT (Friday). The tricky part here is the leverage – only 1:10. Trading large lot sizes will be risky because of the required margin.

I am in as well with the same id as ATC2010. I am using a channel breakout based EA. Profit/Loss is now at +0.2874 using small lot sizes at 0.1 and have increased to 0.3 a few days ago.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Efficiency of EAs at the Championship (ATC2010)

An article appeared on the MQL5 championship titled, ”Evaluating the efficiency of the Championship participants' strategies by the method of Bulashev” that analysed the performance of EAs from different perspectives. It is based on a method highlighted in the article, “Evaluation of Trade Systems - the Effectiveness of Entering, Exiting and Trades in General”.

Efficiency

This refers to how effectives is the trade entered, exit, and the trade itself. Taking just long positions, the effectiveness of the Entering is:

enter_efficiency=(max_price_trade-enter_price)/(max_price_trade-min_price_trade);
With a range 0 to 1.
Similarly, for Exiting:
exit_efficiency=(exit_price - min_price_trade)/(max_price_trade - min_price_trade);
With a range 0 to 1.
For Effectiveness of the trade itself:
trade_efficiency=(exit_price-enter_price)/(max_price_trade-min_price_trade);
Generalised:
trade_efficiency=enter_efficiency+exit_efficiency-1;
The range is –1 to 1.

From the analysis, it seems that the efficiency of entering exiting is not critical, rather it is the money management.

Weighted Efficiency

The difference here is to add the volume of the trade to the formulae. Again from the analysis of the top ten in the championship, the results were similar to the those where the lot volume were not considered.

True Strategists

Just basing on the Effectiveness of the trades yielded a different list from the top 10. It has yielded the following:

TradeEffectivenessTop10



TradeEffectivenessTop10Dealmorethan10



Points to note

The analysis is a short term view as the Championship has not even crossed the half way mark. Hence the true behaviour of the EAs may not have surfaced.

It is often commented that the best EAs are not necessary those at the top. The risk management is such that if you make it, the profits will rise meteorically. But if it fails, the fall is downright hard. So it is the moderate risk EAs that are better suited to most of our temperament. Hence it may be better to judge EAs for the effectiveness of their trades.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Pre-Championship Peformance

Here are the backtest and forward tests results of EA 2010g.


Backtest from 1 Jan 2010 to 1 Aug 2010


Forward test from 2 Jul 2010 to 29 Sep 2010



The forward test is not a true reflection of the final set of parameters chosen and of course the errors that were still existing while the EA was developed.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

ATC2010 - I am in!

After 3 months of learning and working at MQL5, I have got my EA codename "2010g" accepted into ATC2010. MetaQuotes' 2010 Automated Trading Championship is based on EAs written in MQL5, the successor to MQL4.

This year, there are about 1700 registered participants, but only a mere 284 EAs passed the championship rules to compete. This figure was subsequently revised to 314 when the organiser had more time to do a manual test of the submitted EAs. So 2010g is amongst the 314 ready to compete on 4 Oct 2010, Monday. The competition will end on 24 Dec 2010.

2010g is a completely different EA from that submitted in 2008. wetoea is a weekly trend-based EA, which managed to stand at rank 95 out of 705 other EAs. Let's see where this new EA will go, especially when there are fewer EAs in the competition. Anyway, there are many levels to survive, especially when we cannot tweak the EA or correct any mistakes:


  1. not making a loss
  2. not getting margin call