Automated Trading Championship 2012: Registration is Open!

Ready, Steady, Go!

From June 4, 2012, anyone can register to participate in the Automated Trading Championship 2012. Submit your Expert Advisor and it will take part in the battle of the strongest trading robots.

During three months, Expert Advisors will trade on the Forex market without any interference from their authors. The participant whose robot earns the maximum profit during the competition will be the winner of the Championship. The prize fund of the Automated Trading Championship 2012 is $80,000. It will be shared by the top three participants upon completion of the three-month competition.

"The popularity of the MetaTrader 5 platform is growing every day, and we do our best to further increase it," - said Renat Fatkhullin, the chairman of the Jury. "New functions are being added to MQL5, its standard library keeps expanding, the native support for OpenCL has been introduced. In short, we continue to develop the platform adding more exciting features, so it's hard to list all the possibilities of MetaTrader 5. As for the MQL5 language, its syntax has become even closer to C++ and other high-level programming languages. We are not resting on our laurels and continue to develop MQL5 and improve services for traders".

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You can read the full text of the article on the Championship site - Registration for Automated Trading Championship 2012 is Open!

Blogging is extremely popular now, and even presidents have their blogs. Many traders use blogs or we pages to advertise themselves, describing their trading strategies, indicators, achievements, etc.

We know that to attract the maximum number of visitors to your web site you need to publish as many interesting and useful materials as possible. We have created a very simple way to add even more interesting information to your blog or web page - Widgets of the Automated Trading Championship 2012.

A widget is a small script that can be easily added to any web page. Widgets display relevant information from the site of the Automated Trading Championship 2012, and information in them is updated automatically. Our widgets can be customized to fit any website design.

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The full text of the news can be found in the Automated Trading Championship website - Choose Your Widget.

The autumn is coming and the new battle of trading robots is near at hand already. That is the sixth Automated Trading Championship and many of you are already familiar with it. But this time we expect that the ranks of participants will be considerably replenished by the newcomers ready to show their skills in programming of trading strategies. The popularity of MetaTrader 5 and MQL5 is growing steadily and MQL5.community gradually turns into a huge social network of thousands of traders around the world.

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In this article, we will describe main features of the Championship including the following topics:

 

1. how and where the Championship will be held;
2. who will be in the Jury Panel;
3. how to register;
4. how to avoid disqualification;
5. how the winners will be determined;
6. and of course, how they will be awarded.

The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - The Automated Trading Championship 2012 in Brief.

Automated Trading Championship 2012 is an exciting event for all keen on the automated trading. All Applicants are warmly welcome. Unfortunately, we often see that many Expert Advisor developers fail to complete all necessary preparations for some reason. But being an Applicant does not mean being a Participant!

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Joining the competition is not as difficult as it sounds. Just complete a few simple steps and your Expert Advisor will get a real chance to earn real money for you. For your convenience, we have prepared step by step instructions on how to successfully register and fill in your personal data to join the Automated Trading Championship 2012.

The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - How to Participate in the Automated Trading Championship 2012.

Automatic tests of the Expert Advisors submitted by prospective Participants of the Automated Trading Championship 2012 will start soon. It is about time to tell you how to prepare for the Championship and how it will be held in details. We believe that virtually anyone who reads this article will not miss this exciting event.

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In this article you will learn:

 

1. how to register and fill in the data;
2. how to test an Expert Advisor;
3. how to submit your Expert Advisor and what automatic tests are;
4. how the Automated Trading Championship will be held.

The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - Preparing for the Championship and Arrangement Specifics.

More than a month has passed since the start of the registration for the Automated Trading Championship 2012, and we already have about 1000 applicants. This figure significantly exceeds the last year one, as we got about 700 applicants for the first month in 2011.

Two and a half months have left before the registration end and we believe that this Championship will break all records regarding the number of Participants. As always, we remind you not to delay your registration and Expert Advisor submission - it is better to prepare everything in advance.

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We have already described the key features of registration and preparation for the Championship in the articles "How to Participate in the Automated Trading Championship 2012" and "Preparing for the Championship and Arrangement Specifics". Here we will take a closer look at the issues related to uploading Expert Advisor files for the Championship.

The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - How to Submit an Expert Advisor to the Championship.

Any competition consists of the rules mandatory for all its participants. A special group of accounts will be allocated on MetaQuotes-Demo trade server (access.metatrader5.com:443) for the Automated Trading Championship 2012. These accounts will operate under the definite trading conditions.

Each participant gets a special test trading account with virtual $10 000 after the registration to prepare for the Championship. You should connect to this account using specified login and password to test your Expert Advisor in the appropriate trading conditions of the coming competition.

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Launch your Expert Advisor on a test account to detect any possible errors in your trading robot algorithm in real time. You still have enough time to check your robot in the appropriate trading conditions till the end of the registration.
Test your Expert Advisor in the Strategy Tester connecting to the test account provided in your Profile to ensure your participation in the Automated Trading Championship 2012. Only in that case the Championship trading conditions will be considered and the necessary trading environment for a trading robot operation will be used during the tests.
The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - Trading Rules of the Automated Trading Championship 2012.

Less than two months have left before the end of the registration to the Automated Trading Championship 2012!

By now we have accepted personal data of only 530 potential participants out of 1340 submitted applications. We are glad to announce the long-awaited news - automatic tests of submitted Expert Advisors have already started from July 16. It means that there is no reason to wait any further - it is the high time to send your Expert Advisor for a check!

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According to the Championship regulations, each submitted Expert Advisor must undergo a series of automatic tests. They allow to sort out MQL5 codes that just get compiled from the actually well thought-out trading robots. We will take a close look at the automatic tests, the most typical errors and the ways to avoid them. The prize fund of $80 000 is real money and some efforts should be made to get it. But first things first.

Make sure that your Expert Advisor does not contain any of the mentioned errors - submit it to the Championship right now!

The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - Automatic Tests, or How to Get to the Championship Starting Line.

Some applicants think that automatic tests of Expert Advisors are a mere formality, which is not really important for the Championship. They ignore the fact that such tests are objective and valuable experience for automated trading system developers. Here we present an overview of the most common errors revealed during the tests, as well as tips to fix them.

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Trading robots are applications that consume processor's RAM and computational resources. The better is the program, the less resources it requires, i.e. the more efficient it is. Any program can be written in many different ways, and not all of them will be effective by these parameters.

We can be absolutely sure that a poorly designed Expert Advisor will consume a large amount of resources not only when operating on MetaTrader 5 chart during the Championship but also during the automatic tests. Thus, there is another requirement for all trading robots accepted for the Automated Trading Championship 2012 - test should take no longer than 30 minutes.

If your Expert Advisor is not able to fit in this time during the tests, your trading robot evidently has programming errors. For example, MACD Sample from the standard set completes the test on EURUSD H1 at the interval from January 1, 2012 to August 1, 2012 in "Every tick" mode without exceeding 30 seconds. Check it out on your PC.

Strategy Tester in MetaTrader 5 terminal is a multi-symbol one. That allows to perform tests of multicurrency Expert Advisors for the Championship. But nothing comes for free, as multicurrency trading system requires more time for processing ticks, indicators and many other operations related to the quantity of the symbols used in the Expert Advisor. The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - How to Fix Errors in Trading Robots.

Two months of registration for the Automated Trading Championship 2012 have passed and we already can examine some preliminary results. The uptrend of the total applicants number remains in force already exceeding 1600 and we cannot yet determine the possible resistance level.

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This year's results have beaten the record of ATC 2008 notable for its large amount of registrations. At that time, it was performed using MetaTrader 4 platform and MQL4 language.

Seven weeks have left before the end of the registration but you still can join the battle, even if you are new at working with MetaTrader 5. The article Fast Dive into MQL5 has been written especially for those who are doubtful of their skills and abilities or do not know where to begin. The article proves that MQL5 can be mastered by anyone providing plenty of amazing features and opportunities!

Do you want to enter the Championship's TOP-10 and leave your name in the competition chronicles? Then register, fill your personal data and send your Expert Advisor. Good luck!

The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - Another Month of Registration.

All Automated Trading Championships have witnessed the rise and fall of many leaders. Some participants doubled their deposits within a week just to lose their funds in a few consecutive days. Many ex-leaders were not even able to finish the competition in TOP-10. It was even called "the curse of the interview".

We have analyzed the market (the most popular EURUSD pair) behavior during the competitions trying to find any correlations between the market conditions and the achievements of the Championships' winners. All the statistical data concerning the winners of the past years as well as some regularities between their trading strategies and obtained results have been examined.

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Of course, we have analyzed only EURUSD and you can put into question our approach. But this pair remains the basic one and affects the other currencies. We will surely see many exciting things on the market this fall. What will be the main trends of the global economy? Your Expert Advisor should be able to navigate through the volatile market considering various courses of events. That is the key to success. Good luck!

The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - The Mystery of Changing Leaders Solved?

Registration at the Automated Trading Championship 2012 for everyone to challenge for real $ 80,000 will end very soon. There are over 2,000 applications, but only little more than 1000 of them have passed verification of personal data - less than half! Participants, whose EAs have overcome automatic tests 10 times less - just a hundred. Hurry up, only month is left while you can still bring your trading robot to perfection. And, judging by the previous years' experience, it is not too much as it seems.

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Traditionally, in the last month of registration we expect a large influx of Expert Advisers. Judging by the number of applications, it's obvious to see the greater number of competitors this year rather than in previous. This means that those who procrastinate with automatic tests have lesser chance to get to the Championship. We continue to prepare useful materials for the Championship participants and have just published the Trade Operations in MQL5 - It's Easy article which can save time when creating an Expert Advisor.

While there is time, we strongly encourage all the contenders to test their Expert Advisors before sending them for testing. If you successfully test your trading robot in environment closest to the Championship conditions, you significantly increase your chance to join the competition. Read on to learn how to do it.

The full text of the news can be found at the Championship website - One Month Left Before Registration Deadline.

You want it, you've got it! After the publication of the article The Mystery of Changing Leaders Solved? we have received many requests to write an article having a greater analytical bias. Today we have a hot topic - comparing the Expert Advisors' parameters obtained during the automatic tests before the Automated Trading Championship 2011 with the ones shown during the Championship itself.

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Each test report contains many statistical parameters from the number of trades to profit factor, Sharpe ratio, etc. In this article we will examine only some general parameters in order not to disclose any personal data:

 

1. Final balance
2. Number of input parameters
3. Timeframe
4. Profit deals ratio
5. Profit factor

We will try to find out how the automatic test results correlate with the Championship ones (if there is any correlation at all).
Read the full article on the Championship's website - Optimization VS Reality: Evidence from ATC 2011.

Are you still full of doubts that testing a strategy on historical data can be useful in real trading? In this article, we will compare achievements of the previous Championships' leading participants with their results shown in MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester during the automatic tests.

The Championship observers have always been curious about the results shown by the leading trading robots in the Strategy Tester before the competitions. Are they genuine winners or was it pure luck?

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Qualification Round Participants

Results of the following participants will be analyzed in the article:

 

1. Igor Korepin (Xupypr) - 1st place at ATC 2011.
2. Ge Senlin (yyy999) - 3rd place at АТС 2011.
3. Vitaly Antonov (beast) - 4th place at АТС 2011.
4. Andrey Bobryashov (tim0866) - 7th place at АТС 2011.
5. Ilnur Khasanov (aharata) - 10th place at АТС 2011.
6. Boris Odintsov (bobsley) - 1st place at АТС 2010.
7. Andrey Voitenko (avoitenko) - 4th place at АТС 2010.
8. Dmitry Yedelkin (Yedelkin) - 7th place at АТС 2010.
9. Dimitar Manov (Manov) - 10th place at АТС 2010.

Not all participants have responded to our request to use their competition data. Therefore, we have not been able to include the entire TOP-10 into our analysis. So, "we have what we have."

Read the full article on the Championship's website - Leaders of the Automated Trading Championship 2010 and 2011: Pole-Position.

Each newcomer wants to create a trading system capable of making maximum profit on each price movement. As time passes by, traders gain more and more experience finally reaching more realistic expectations and abandoning their dreams to buy exactly on the very bottoms and sell on the very tops. Everyone knows that it is impossible to trade with the accuracy of ZigZag indicator often shown on history data. But it is possible enough to use ZigZag to calculate the virtual maximum profit...

Zigzags Are Different

All traders know about this indicator and it is impossible to find even a single trader who has not used it at least once. Some traders liken ZigZag to Elliott waves, some use it to obtain objective data on the current market state. Each developer of automated trading systems has his or her own idea about ZigZag.

The terminal's standard delivery contains two types of this indicator - standard one for several generations of MetaTrader terminals ZigZag and its color version ZigZagColor. Over the years, many attempts have been made to improve this indicator. Perhaps, no one knows the exact number of versions, except for Eugeni Neumoin, developer of ZUP complex.

We have decided to use ZigZag from the standard delivery as a tool for a simple analysis of the Automated Trading Championship currency pairs. So, today we will finally answer the question that we could not answer earlier due to lack of time or skills: "How much can you earn with ZigZag (in theory, of course)?"

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What and How Have We Measured?

The Championship audience, as well as everyone interested in algo trading, was always curious about how many Championship participants trade some definite symbol or timeframe. Therefore, we have examined all 12 currency pairs that were available at the Automated Trading Championship 2011 and used ZigZag to calculate the following parameters:

 

1. number of ZigZag bends,
2. maximum possible profit when trading 1 lot,
3. average bend length.

Calculations have been made on the period from October 1, 2011 to December 25, 2011, which roughly covers the last year's Championship. Calculations have been made for twelve currency pairs on 8 timeframes from M1 to H4 inclusively. Larger timeframes have not been considered, as they were not so popular among the participants of the Automated Trading Championship 2011. We also wanted to know if there any correlation between selection of a currency pair and its characteristics in this review.

Read the full article on the Championship's website - Applying ZigZag for Analysis.

Registration for the Automated Trading Championship has entered its final stage. Less than three days have left before the deadline. More than 3 400 applications have already been submitted. However, it depends only on the applicants themselves if they are able to become actual participants. In recent days, the number of potential competitors for the prize money is increasing but most of them will not be accepted for the competition.

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Test and optimize your strategy and make sure that the settings contain exactly the same parameters you have found. Check the limitations for the operation time and account number to let your trading robot not only pass all the automatic tests but also start trading on the Championship itself. Submit your Expert Advisor if you have not already done that, and good luck!

Read the full article on the Championship's website - Last Days before the Registration End.

On September 21, 2012 at 23:59 registration for participation in the Automated Trading Championship 2012 was finished. Some participants were looking forward to this moment, while others were saddened as they have not managed to polish their trading robots.

Expert Advisors are not accepted anymore and the EA automated verification system is stopped. Now it is impossible to apply for participation in the Championship. During the remaining days until the start of the contest the Expert Advisors and personal details will be checked manually. The multiple registrations facts will be revised as well.

Applications for participation in the Championship were accepted for almost 4 months. More than 3,670 applicants have registered on the website for that period exceeding the previous year's results by half.

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It's interesting to know that for the last three years not only has increased the number of applications for participation in the Championship, but also the number of countries from which these application have been submitted:

 

1. ATC 2010 - 90
2. ATC 2011 - 101
3. ATC 2012 - 118

Automated Trading Championship 2012 with $80,000 of prize money will start in less than a week. Soon we will find out whose trading robots will take part in the Championship!

Read the full article on the Championship's website - Registration Is Finished!

Sixth Week, Chasing the Leader

We continue to monitor participants of the Automated Trading Championship 2012 marathon that started six weeks ago. Yellow jersey is still retained by JPAlonso's Expert Adviser from United States. This participant goes ahead with a wide margin, despite the fact that the last three trades were unprofitable and devastated his account for almost $12,000.


Alas, but our recent interviewee's trading robot flew out of the top three, thus making a way for his rivals. And all this is due to that ROMAN5's EA from South Africa yet continues to sustain a huge unfixed loss by open long position. We wonder whether he can wait for a favorable wind? Note that the profit factor of this participant still cannot be determined simply by a lack of loss.

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Read the full article on the Championship's website Sixth Week, Chasing the Leader.