All about Automated Trading Championship: Interviews with the Participants'06

MetaQuotes | 6 August, 2008

Where else can you get to know about traders' views of trading? What methods do other Participants add to their armory? What difficulties does one trader or another see on the way toward a successful profitable strategy? What do they pay attention to in their work? There are many traders' forums where visitors exchange their opinions and knowledge. However, all this is often dispersed about various threads in the internet vastitude. The Championship is aimed at collecting traders from all over the world in one place for them to be able to both demonstrate the work of their EAs and tell about themselves and their preferences in trading.

Each trader goes his or her own way, although every one sees the same quotes in the screens of their monitors and read the same books. Besides affording an opportunity to discuss trading matters on the personal page of each Participant, we put our questions to many traders and published articles based on the interviews in three languages.

	Interview with Sergey Kovalyov Sergey Kovalyov about trading, Expert Advisors, Automated Trading Championship and about his book.
	Interview with Rashid Umarov The 3-month long Championship should find the most reliable and stable trading algorithms and deselect the chance-winners. No assurance can be given that experts taken the first three places will be the best ones. But it is highly probable.
	Interview with CodersGuru "Raymond Toh have said in one of his articles: “There’s no way to make profit trading Forex without firmly established rules and the discipline to obey them”. You can not obey your rules if you trade manually, believe me I tried manual trading and lost a lot of money. For the peace of your mind you have to find a programmer and describe your manual practice to him and he will give you back an Expert Advisor that makes your manual trading 100% automated!
	Interview with Andrey Khatimlyanskyy The Championship is a good motivation for those who write Expert Advisors to develop better programs. The rules are rather strict in order to avoid chance gains, though they eliminate many good strategies. The promised prizes impress me much, but I would add some small incentive prizes. Organization is on the up and up, and I think the technical aspect will make the grade, too. I suppose such championships should be regular. But to begin with, let us observe this current one.
	Interview with Patrick Nouvion I was in Vegas for the Forex Traders Expo last week or so, and still a lot of people came to me and asked "What is automated trading?" and once I told them they still could not believe it was fully automated. A lot of gurus insist on execution and how it has to be fast, mechanical. They insist on how you have to respect your own rules, well an automated expert is the perfect solution for all this, but not enough people realize it is available yet.
	Interview with Alexander Ovchinikov, the Current Championship Leader I agree that stops must be placed. I just could place a StopLoss for my expert at 400 to 500 points. I think there is not a great difference, in terms of historical data of 2006. It is true, the expert does not close positions by itself. I did not even notice that during testing as I only watched profit.
	Interview with Chayutra Sriboonruang (vixenme) No, I'm not afraid of those lost positions much because I chose USDJPY that always swing up-down. Even it intends to go up but it will come down a bit anyway. Then I believe that I still can get the profit. And also by the concept of multilotscalper, this can ensure that the winning possibility is bigger... in my opinion.
	Interview with Harry Brinkhuis To my findings a Take Profit of 42 and a Stop Loss of 84 is the right combination for Phoenix. They are part of what I call the balance between settings, timeframe, Stop Loss and Take Profit. Other people that were testing Phoenix tried to change Take Profit and Stop Loss and got very different results. They somehow changed "The Balance"!
	Interview with Karol Przybytkowski (karolp) I decided to maximize my risk in order to have a better chance at getting to the top. I guess that many participants did the same, because someone is going to get lucky and get a high balance. In order to compete with these people, it is necessary to increase risk.
	Interview with Lingyu Jiang (jianglingyu) My Expert Advisor tries to catch the main trend of a day. It's based on the famous catfx50 strategy. Sometimes it will use Moving Average cross as the signal. The main indicator is StepMA. It will take 0, 1 or 2 trades a day normally, and has a StopLoss as small as 18 pips. If it wins, it makes 20-100 pips. The theory behind this expert is: "Many a pickle makes a muckle".
	Interview with Alexander Egorov (Aver) While writing Expert Advisors, I knew from practice that trailing stop rarely pays off, one just loses one's profits. Though, it can be related to my experts, not to the real trading. I tried to use trailing stops instead of a strictly set profit. It did not pay off.
	Interview with Ilia Antonov (Via) Frankly speaking, the collocation of "money management" associates me to something complicated. Of course, one has to be well aware of what one does, have a good grasp of risks and their reasons. This is necessary. Otherwise, it is just a game for Strategy Tester.
	Interview with Luis Guilherme Damiani (ldamiani) There is a myth among the newcomers (course sellers repeat it a lot): The simpler the trading system is the better. There is nothing farer from the truth! Why should a simple Trading System be profitable for such a complex phenomenon as the markets?
	Interview with Merab Sturua (Merabiko) The most important thing for the Expert Advisor is the logic, the strategy contents. Applicability under all market conditions and a properly written code. Money management is helpful, of course. But only as an idea about how much of the deposit one can lose and how much profit one can expect to gain. If there is a clear idea of to what limits the profit-loss fluctuations can be expected, it is possible to provide the program within a half of an hour with a plough-back method or with a technique that prevents losses of the profits gained.
	Interview with Valeri Karpenko (valvk) The most stable Experts are those having logical processing of the most frequently occurring errors. By the way, the Championship has given a very nice statistics on such errors: both for refuses to open a position and for Experts' start. Unfortunately, traders pay not very much attention to this: either they do not have time for this or they just do not mind consumption of the server resources in the dealing center. This is why some positions are not opened or they are opened at a wrong level. So, I suppose that the higher the standard of the Experts' programming culture is, the more stable they are.
	Interview with Michael Bullock (Zonker) Constantly plowing back all the profit and scaling up the position is pure suicide trading on a real account. But that is not relevant, this is a competition, over 250 competitors, and only three walk away with anything. You do whatever it takes to maximize your chances to be in that Top Three. I'm not sure you can talk about risk in the context of the competition, risk implies you might lose something, but here there is only a chance to gain for those who beat the odds.
	Interview with Rich If the market goes flat and we all are brought to a stand, I will take the first place, and the Top Three will be the same as it is now. But, judging by the widening of Bollinger Bands, the year is not expected to be closed calmly. So the fortune will shuffle all of use many times within the resting few days.
	Interview with Harry Brinkhuis (Hendrick) Harry is a developer from the Netherlands. His Expert Advisor, Phoenix, is quite successful and always in the Top Ten of the Championship. We got information that Harry had started new developments. So we decided to ask him about details.