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.
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 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.
An article appeared on the MQL5 championship titled, ”Evaluating the efficiency of the Championship participants' strategies by the method of Bulashev” that analysed the performance of EAs from different perspectives. It is based on a method highlighted in the article, “Evaluation of Trade Systems - the Effectiveness of Entering, Exiting and Trades in General”.
Efficiency
This refers to how effectives is the trade entered, exit, and the trade itself. Taking just long positions, the effectiveness of the Entering is:
enter_efficiency=(max_price_trade-enter_price)/(max_price_trade-min_price_trade);
With a range 0 to 1.
Similarly, for Exiting:
exit_efficiency=(exit_price - min_price_trade)/(max_price_trade - min_price_trade);
With a range 0 to 1.
For Effectiveness of the trade itself:
trade_efficiency=(exit_price-enter_price)/(max_price_trade-min_price_trade);
Generalised:
trade_efficiency=enter_efficiency+exit_efficiency-1;
Just basing on the Effectiveness of the trades yielded a different list from the top 10. It has yielded the following:
Points to note
The analysis is a short term view as the Championship has not even crossed the half way mark. Hence the true behaviour of the EAs may not have surfaced.
It is often commented that the best EAs are not necessary those at the top. The risk management is such that if you make it, the profits will rise meteorically. But if it fails, the fall is downright hard. So it is the moderate risk EAs that are better suited to most of our temperament. Hence it may be better to judge EAs for the effectiveness of their trades.
