ATC 2008: Interview with Ilia Gontmakher (Igonter)

[Forex Trader]

On the website of the Automated Trading Championship 2008, an Interview with Ilia Gontmakher has been published (https://championship.mql5.com/2012/en/2008). Ilia known in many traders’ forums under the nickname Igonter is a moderator of one of such forums. Ilia actively develops mechanical trading systems.

The very beginners can’t correctly use software for system testing. The most common errors at this stage are: work inside a bar, when instead of a real variant of price path the most optimistic variant is chosen; looking into future in this or that way (what, naturally, can’t be achieved in real life) and pipsing inside spread not taking into account whether it is possible in real trading to execute so many orders within such a short period of time.

“Advanced” traders fall into the trap of result fitting as a rule. I am not an exception. It is very simple to make a decision on history, because we already know the right answer. In reality everything is much more difficult. Use of such as system in reality is likely to have disastrous effects. Moreover, fitting can be of such hidden forms, that even a specialist can’t detect it at the stage of a system creation. My favorite method to combat it is a “blind” test when a certain quite large part of history not used for optimization is selected beforehand. And the final result then is tested on this period. And if you do everything earnestly, it becomes clear what a system is worth of.

The interview was published on the website of Automated Trading Championship 2008 in the News section.

Sponsors of the Automated Trading Championship 2008 are FXCM (Forex Capital Markets LLC), Interbank FX LLC (IBFX), FXDD and the TRADERS’ magazine. The organizer of the Championship is MetaQuotes Software Corp.