Automated Trading Championship 2011: Registration Is Open!!

Half a year has passed since the Automated Trading Championship 2010. During this time, many EA developers certainly had time to reflect on the contest results and now prepare new trading strategies based on this valuable experience. Soon we will witness a new exciting battle of trading robots for $80,000.

Once again, different strategies underlying Expert Advisors will come together in a fierce battle. And once again the attention of the traders community will be directed to the dramatic change of leaders, the sudden rises of recent outsiders and unexpected falls of acknowledged masters.

This year’s Championship will be even more interesting and exciting than ever before. And there are several reasons for that. First, MQL-developers have had enough time to study the new features of the MQL5 language and are ready to enter the new Championship fully armed. Second, the expanded functionality of the MetaTrader 5 client terminal and the release of the new MQL5 Wizard should significantly increase the number of participants, because now the development of Expert Advisors is available to anyone, and not only to experienced MQL-programmers.

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“Over 300 Expert Advisors participated in the previous Championship, -says Stanislav Starikov, the Championship Jury member. – This year the number will increase substantially – we expect to receive several thousands of applications for participation. The reason for this surge lies in the recently released MQL5 Wizard, using which any trader without programming skills can easily create a trading robot. Although, this would not guarantee a victory in the Championship, of course”.

Trading robots written in MQL5 are allowed to enter the competition. From June 1 till September 23 anyone can register as a Participant and compete for the prize of $80,000. The Championship will start on the 3rd of October and will end on the 23rd of December. Participation is free.

Create Expert Advisors, register and get ready to compete with the seasoned fighters of previous Championships. This is going to be a hot battle!

The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

Only a week has passed since the beginning of the registration, and already more than 250 people have expressed their desire to compete for the ATC prizes. More than a hundred of them have submitted their information and have been accepted after their data were checked by a moderator.

But based on the experience of the previous Automated Trading Championships, we known that a significant portion of those willing to participate in the competition couldn't complete the registration stage. We will try to describe all the aspects of how to register and fill out personal data to help everyone easily join the new race.

What you need to do in order to participate in the Automated Trading Championship 2011:

 

1. Register and confirm your participation
2. Provide the necessary confidential information about yourself to the organizers
3. Download all the files required for the operation of your Expert Advisor

Registration

The Championship website at championship.mql5.com is tightly integrated into MQL5.community. Therefore, there are two ways to submit an application for participation:

 

1. If you do not have an account at mql5.com. Complete the standard registration procedure on the site of the Automated Trading Championship 2011. Activate your account by clicking on the link from the email you receive after the registration. In this case, your participation in the Championship will be automatically confirmed.
2. If you have already registered at the MQL5.community. In this case, you simply need to log on mql5.com, go to the Championship website and confirm your participation by clicking the appropriate button.

OpenID

MQL5.community now supports a new convenient way of authentication, which was earlier announced in our forum. If you do not have an mql5.com account, and want to take part in the Championship (as well as become a member of the MQL5.community) we recommend that you use the convenience of this new technology.

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The registration procedure using OpenID is pretty simple:

 

1. Select one of the OpenID providers and enter the details of your account.
2. Create a login name under which you will be presented at the Automated Trading Championship 2011 and in the MQL5.community.

Benefits of OpenID:

 

1. No need to create a complex password during registration
2. No need to confirm your email address, as during a usual registration procedure
3. No need to enter your login and password to login on MQL5.com and championship.mql5.com - just click on the icon of your OpenID provider.

You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - How to Participate in the Automated Trading Championship 2011.

The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

Victor Kirillin has been working for MetaQuotes Software Corp. for over two years and is directly related to the MQL5 Wizard.

The MQL5 Wizard is built into the MetaEditor 5 (the MQL5 development environment) and is designed to assists programmers in routine operations when creating programs for the MetaTrader 5 terminal: indicators, scripts and Expert Advisors. But the main feature of the new MQL5 Wizard is the ability to create a ready-to-work trading robot without writing a single line of code! This is what we are going to talk about with Victor.
You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - Interview with Victor Kirillin: Benefit from the MQL5 Wizard
The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

Hundreds of participants from all over the world will fight for the main prize of the Automated Trading Championship 2011. For three months, participating Expert Advisors will conduct trade operations trying to achieve the best results. The criterion for assessing their trade performance is the profit obtained by a trading robot during the Championship. All the Expert Advisors participating in the competition must comply with the Championship Rules.

With four months until the start of the Championship, Expert Advisor developers have enough time to prepare a trading strategy and optimize the parameters of a trading system. But to enter the competition, you need to take into account a lot of various nuances. Here we consider the basic questions that all applicants should pay attention to.

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You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - How to Prepare an Expert Advisor for the Automated Trading Championship 2011.

The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

A month has passed since we opened Registration for the Automated Trading Championship 2011. During this first month, we have received more than 700 applications, and about 300 participants have already specified their personal data. These are almost twice the corresponding characteristics of the ATC 2010. Obviously the trend of previous championships repeats: in the first ATC 2006 on MQL4 there were more than 300 registrations during the first month, and almost 650 registrations during the first month of the second Championship with the MQL4 strategies.

Undoubtedly, traders have been showing great interest in MQL5 over the past year. The MetaTrader 5 Client Terminal is constantly improving, and this year EA authors have access to absolutely new features: generating Expert Advisors in the new MQL5 Wizard, handy coding with snippets, new Strategy Tester modes, distributed computing via the MQL5 Cloud Network and other numerous improvements of MetaTrader 5 platform.

Stanislav Starikov, the Championship Jury member, expects at least 2000 applications for participation in the Automated Trading Championship 2011, and with new features of the MQL5 Wizard and Strategy Tester - no less than 1000 participating Expert Advisors. "We have a lot of work to do, and as always we hope to see better, more resilient and efficient trading robots in the new competition", Stanislav said.

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You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - The First Month of Registration.

The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

To participate in the Automated Trading Championship 2011, you need to register and submit an Expert Advisor trading according to your strategy. Read more about how to register and submit required materials in the article "How to Participate in the Automated Trading Championship 2011".

Don't forget that your Expert Advisor must comply with the Championship Rules, be profitable and operate correctly during automatic verification. These are the minimum requirements for participation in the Championship.

But to win the Automated Trading Championship 2011, it is not enough just to write a correctly working Expert Advisor. To become the Winner, you need to develop a trading system that would earn you maximum profits. What is the secret of success of past Championship winners?

In this article we will look at the statistical characteristics of strategies that were most successful in the past Automated Trading Championships (2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010).

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You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - The Best Strategies of the 2006-2010 Automated Trading Championships.

The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

We continue to publish materials that will be very useful for the potential participants of the ATC 2011. This time we consider algorithms that will help you to check whether trade operations comply with the Rules of the Automated Trading Championship 2011. Our purpose is to create a class of trade operations, which can be used as part of Expert Advisors participating in the Championship. This class will help you follow the Rules of the ATC 2011 in your EAs.

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You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - A Class of Trade Operations for the ATC 2011.

The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

Optimization of trading strategies is an important factor for creating of successful trading systems. In the article "The Best Strategies of the 2006-2010 Automated Trading Championships" we reviewed statistical characteristics of top 20 trading systems of past Championships.

This time we use Kohonen maps to analyze the whole picture based on the statistical characteristics of participants of the Automated Trading Championship 2010.

The advantage of Kohonen self-organizing maps is their ability to "project" multidimensional data onto a plane. With the learning algorithm of Kohonen, network multidimensional vectors with similar directions appear close to each other and form clusters. Data were analyzed using the Deductor Academic package developed by BaseGroup Labs.

Statistical Characteristics of Trading Systems
Trade reports of Automated Trading Championship participants contain various statistical characteristics of trading systems. We have chosen some of them for our analysis:

 

1. Total Net Profit - the difference between the total profit and total loss;
2. Profit Factor - shows the profit generated by profitable trades divided by the losses generated by losing trades;
3. Relative drawdown - shows the maximal drawdown percentage, allowing to estimate possible losses as a percentage of the initial deposit;
4. Trades - the number of trades;
5. Profit Trades (%) - percentage of profitable trades;
6. Average Profit Trade - amount of the average profit;
7. Average Loss Trade - amount of the average loss;
8. GHPR (%) - geometric mean of a relative gain per trade;
9. AHPR (%) - arithmetic mean of a relative gain per trade;
10. Sharpe ratio;
11. ZScore - a serial test of correlation between deals;
12. ZScore (%) - the probability of correlation between deals;
13. LR Correlation;
14. LR Standard Error - standard error of balance deviation from the linear regression;
15. MFE-Profit Correlation - correlation between trade results and Maximum Favorable Excursion (profit in the favorable direction of price movement, use of Take Profit);
16. MAE-Profit Correlation - correlation between trade results and Maximum Adverse Excursion (loss in the unfavorable direction of price movement, use of Stop Loss);
17. MFE-MAE Correlation;
18. Recovery Factor.

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You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - Analyzing Trading Results of the ATC 2010 Participants.
The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

The pace of registration for the Automated Trading Championship 2011 is much more intensive compared to the previous year. Over 1250 people have already applied to participate. This figure is very close to that of 2008, when, at the peak of the annual tournaments of Expert Advisors in MQL4, there were about 1,500 applications.

We remind you that the last day of registration is September 23. Until this date, you need to fill your personal data, submit your trading robot and pass automatic testing. All those wishing to take part in the competition must go through two steps - register and send an Expert Advisor.

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You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - Another Month of Registration for the Automated Trading Championship 2011.

The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

At the moment 1380 people have applied to participate in the Automated Trading Championship 2011 and each of them must submit his/her own unique trading system realized in an Expert Advisor on MQL5. Championship rules impose limitations and requirements for submitted files to ensure that all the participants are in equal conditions. Non-compliance with the conditions will not let a participant take part in the Automated Trading Championship.
Automatic tests are designed to detect the following bugs at the preliminary stage:

 

1. trading errors - non-processing of the results of executed trading requests;
2. loss-making strategy - knowingly loss-making strategies will not be accepted for the Championship;
3. processor resources excessive consumption - faulty code creates excessive load not only on the "guilty" Expert Advisor terminal but also interferes with the work of the rest of the Expert Advisors launched on the same computer;
4. generation of a huge amount of entries in the Experts log - all messages of an Expert Advisor are not only displayed in the appropriate terminal log but are also transferred to a participant Profile at the Championship website.

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Automatic tests are launched several times a day. All Expert Advisors that were added or modified since the last launch undergo this procedure. So, if you have changed your files in a participant's Profile, you do not need to write to Championship moderators asking to check them once more. Just wait for the next test of your Expert Advisor.
A new message containing a brief summary is added to a participant's Profile after each passing of the automatic test. Full html-report is attached to the "Files" section.
You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - Automatic Tests of Expert Advisors Have Started.

The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

Registration for the Automated Trading Championship 2011 has entered its final stage - automatic tests of submitted Expert Advisors have started. However, most of Expert Advisors have not passed automatic testing yet. Moreover, there are participants, whose personal details are incomplete or filled in incorrectly. Therefore, once again we would like you to pay attention to the following important points.

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Filling Personal Data

1. Your profile has the "Issue/expiration date" field in the ID document related section. Usually ID documents have an issue date. However, in some countries they may have only an expiration date instead. If the issue date is specified in your document, please enter this date in the above field; otherwise please enter the expiration date.
2. ZIP Code is a required field, and registration will not be confirmed unless this box is filled. ZIP code is the postal code of your area, and not a telephone code - please be careful when filling in this box.
3. Any questions arising in the process of verifying participant's details, are published in the profile of this user. However, some of participants ignore these questions. Please note that such ignorance is a ground for your registration refusal.

There is still one more month for registering in the ATC 2011. Here are some preliminary results: 1650 people have submitted their applications, but only 650 of them have passed the personal details checking stage.

You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - One Month before the Registration Deadline.

The Automated Trading Championship 2011 is sponsored by MIG Bank, Go Markets Pty Ltd and Vantage FX. The media sponsor is Forex-TSD.

Get EA Tree, the first drag and drop MQL5 EA Builder at www.eatree.com

EA Tree Money Management settings are optimized for ATC 2011 rules, so you can turn your ideas into an EA for ATC 2011 in minutes.


What is EA Tree?
EA Tree is the first drag and drop MetaTrader MQL5 expert advisor builder. It is a windows application that runs locally on your computer. You can create complex MQL5 EAs using a very easy to use graphical user interface.
In EA Tree, expert advisors are created by connecting boxes together. Boxes may contain MQL5 functions, technical indicators, custom indicators, or values. Outputs of one box may be connected to inputs of another box to form a “tree of boxes”. EA Tree generates MQL5 code from the “tree of boxes” and then uses the MetaTrader platform installed on your computer to convert the MQL5 code into an executable Expert Advisor.

Benefits of using EA Tree
· Easy to use and understand drag and drop graphical user interface
· You do not need programming background
· You can quickly learn MQL5
· Privacy of your trading secrets. No need to share your ideas with anyone else.
· You decrease EA development time to minutes instead of days or months.
· You can develop complex MQL5 EAs with multiple currencies and multiple timeframes.
· You can incorporate multiple trading strategies into one EA
· You easily reuse code by saving and loading diagrams (trees of boxes)
· You are still able to import MQL5 custom indicators
· You create correct MetaTrader 5 MQL code every time




Please let us know if you have any questions.

Best regards,
EATree Team
[email protected]
http://www.eatree.com

Hi All,
I am currently travelling in Kenya and I tried to connect to the MQL5 website through the Metatrader demo system and also the website www.mql5.com . both seems to be not responding for last 2 days.

Could someone please confirm the website are down or is it just bad connection here.

Thanks

Same here. Guess it's a problem with the site.

Wow, it is 3 days since the site went down. Is the firm still around? anyone has news what is going on.

Temporary problems with our Web resources

From midnight August 29th till now all our Web resources, including our mail server, are unavailable due to unavoidable circumstances. The problem is caused by hardware failure on the side of our host. Currently, efforts are underway to fix this situation.


We will inform our clients as soon as our sites are back up.


We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Thanks for your reply. I think it would be good if you could start your competition 1 week later and thoroughly check all server issues. Looking forward to the competition.

Sponsors about the Automated Trading Championship 2011

In anticipation of the start of the Automated Trading Championship 2011, we have interviewed our sponsors about different aspects of automated trading.

Anna Serbinenko, Chris Reynolds and Rupert Kain have shared their opinions about the Championship, the current state and prospects of automated trading and the services that their companies provide to the traders who use Expert Advisors in their trading. We hope that it will be interesting to all traders to see how much weight brokers give to the future development of automated trading systems.

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Anna Serbinenko (MIG Bank):
Chris Reynolds (GO Markets):
Rupert Kain (Vantage FX):
The full text is available on the Championship website - Sponsors about the Automated Trading Championship 2011.

The Sponsors of the Automated Trading Championship 2011 are MIG Bank, Go Markets and Vantage FX. The Media Sponsor of the Championship is Forex-TSD.

Three and a half months have passed since the beginning of the registration for the Automated Trading Championship 2011. 2130 people applied to participate, but only 1037 of the applicants were accepted after their personal data had been checked by the moderator. More than 1000 applicants were not accepted because they had not submitted all necessary data.

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"We have tens of participants who filled their data. But we can't accept them because their address is filled insufficiently or an identification document issue (or termination) date is absent, – the Jury Panel member Stanislav Starikov says. – Of course, we will try to clarify this issues with each applicant separately but only after the registration procedure is finished".

The last day of the registration is September 23, 2011. We strongly recommend not to wait till the last moment. Send your Expert Advisor, if you want to participate in the Championship.

The full text is available on the Championship website - Last Days before the Registration End.

The Sponsors of the Automated Trading Championship 2011 are MIG Bank, Go Markets and Vantage FX. The Media Sponsor of the Championship is Forex-TSD.

Before the start of each Championship, we receive hundreds of Expert Advisors that are subject to automatic preliminary testing. We decided to analyze testing reports of all applicants for participation in the Automated Trading Championship 2010. So we studied 425 reports of the Expert Advisors that were subject to automatic testing last year.


What we analyzed
Each Expert Advisor testing report contains a large number of statistical values, like the number of trades or the maximum consecutive losses. However, we were interested not in the testing results shown during automatic checks, but in the preferences of participants in terms of the following parameters:

 

1. the symbol on which the Expert Advisor was tested
2. chart timeframe
3. the number of input parameters of an Expert Advisor.

Our interest is connected, first of all, with the every developer of trading systems faces such questions. Each currency pair has its own character and advantages, a chart timeframe largely determines the trading activity of the Expert Advisor, while the number of input parameters an both help to optimize a system and lead a developer into the quagmire of fitting.


Distribution of Expert Advisors Based on Currency Pairs
Traditionally, in the first statistical report of Automated Trading Championships we publish data about the number of Expert Advisors trading this or that symbol. Based on this data we didn't doubt that EURUSD would carry the palm - being the most popular currency pair from year to year, it was used in 296 Expert Advisors.

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The full text is available on the Championship website - Preferences of the ATC 2010 Participants.

The Sponsors of the Automated Trading Championship 2011 are MIG Bank, Go Markets and Vantage FX. The Media Sponsor of the Championship is Forex-TSD.