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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Automated Trading Championship - wetoea after ATC2008

What is life for wetoea after ATC2008? It took me a while to figure out how to solve the gapping prices, and finally take wetoea for a run at FXDD because this broker has the same server time as ATC. Here's the results so far, pretty decent isn't it?

Started on 31 Mar 2009, the results above is at 24 Apr 2009, with a total trades of 16. Starting equity is $3,000 and it has a decent profit of $1380. Not bad for a month with a return of 46%. Maximum drawdown is 5.5%.

I will let it run autopilot and see how it goes. Unfortunately demo accounts at FXDD is not forever unlike some other brokers. That's it for ATC2008.

Automated Trading Championship – Will not be held for 2009

There will be no ATC2009! MetaQuotes said in their website that they would like to concentrate on releasing MQL5 this year and hence the Championship this year is cancelled. Instead, they will hold the Championship next year based on MQL5.

And what is MQL5? Another language to learn, EAs have to be rewritten and  more about MQL5 in future entries….

So this is it, no more blog entries on this topic except one last one to share the results of wetoea after ATC2008.

Automated Trading Championship - My 2008 Experiences

The reason why I can write so much on MetaQuotes' s Automated Trading Championship is because I was a participant in 2008. Everything was new for me, and the mad rush to understand the rules and then coding an expert advisor, discovering the intolerances of all sorts of errors, and finally dishing out a half-baked EA that got stuck in the early part of the competition.

I coded an EA based on a weekly strategy, and risked on the higher side for the lot volume so that the EA can get ahead. The currency pair traded was EURUSD. I have always wanted to do a multi-currency pairs EA but just could not find the time for it.

One week after the competition started, EURUSD threw up a more than 100 pips gap over the weeks, and my EA was "lost" simply because I did not handle the big gap.



But on the whole it traded very little but managed to get a profit of $1451, ranked at 95 out of 705. Nothing to be proud of especially over such a small gain. But then, it did give a nice feeling that I managed to be the few who could maintain the equity and gained some profit.







More importantly, it made at least 5 trades which was a competition requirement. But I guess it does not matter because the true performance of the EA has been marred by its inactivity for many weeks, and so it is not reflective of its capability or incapability.

Automated Trading Championship – Why Join?

What are the possible reasons for wanting to participate in ATC? The reasons are many, from the most trivial of just having some fun to potentially finding business opportunities. Let’s discuss some of this.

1. Self-selected MQL4 Olympian

Well, when you are a participant, you country is listed and so are your fellow countrymen. Within that you can have fun to see if you are doing better than them or better still in a small world like us, it looks like an Olympic game. Just think - you cab select yourself to represent your country.

2. Self-disciplined EA

Your EA needs to be efficient in using computing resources and error-free. Even if you have escaped the scrutiny before the competition, you may run into some errors which will disqualify you. Participating will help you build more efficient EAs and force you to discipline your EA and yourself and up the ante.

3. Making new MQL4 friends

Hey you can go around as a participant and drop messages on other participants and they on yours, so hopefully you get to know more like-minded MQL4 freaks.

4. Benchmark your EA

This is a good time with all participants on common ground to pit your EA against others and see how well it performs. It will tell you how good or bad your strategies are. Or maybe it is not the strategies but poor coding. Whatever it is, it will help you to see what kind of EA you have written.

5. Selling your EA.

If your EA show promising results, rest assured that there are many eyes from all over the world who will express interests to purchase your EA.

6. Business opportunities

Or you might get requests by intermediaries who will host your EA as a list of offerings to their customers and earn some bucks in return.

I am sure there are more. If you can think of any, drop me some comments!

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