By Oz Golan, Tradency.
Meta Quotes 5th championship take place on the 4th of October 2010, with grand total prizes of 80,000USD. The 2009 annual championship was skipped by Meta Quotes, possibly because of preparations to release the new MT5 platform and the MQL5 language.
The main purpose of the competition agenda according to MetaQuotes "is promoting the idea of the automated trading and the new development environment Meta Quotes Language 5 (MQL5)."
Three important rules were announced by MetaQoutes in order to reflect real trading environment:
1. Scalping is not allowed – "never use scalping: if the profits of 25% of trades, made by the end of the contest, are detected to range within the spread, the Participant will be disqualified". Strategies who use scalping method in demo account are most likely not to reflect live trading results, because of market fluctuation and the differences between a "clean" feed of the demo account and a "real" feed of a live account, and because of the sensitivity for the differences between Brokers spreads.
2. Limiting Max positions / amount – "The maximum combined amount of positions and pending orders' lots, regardless of the direction on one symbol, is 15. Stop-losses and take-profits are not taken into account" – to prevent non realistic trading Leverage , Metaqoues are limiting the maximum open positions total lots size.
3. The winner will be determined by the highest balance at the end of the competition - "Only three Participants, having the maximum balance at the moment of the contest’s closure, can become the winners of the Championship".
One may claim that highest balance doesn’t necessary reflect the best strategy since factors such as: Risk, MAX DD etc. are not taken into consideration. However it seems reasonable that in a two month competition it's hard to determine a better method for ranking.
It will be interesting to see how many strategies will participate in this year, since I believe that this championship is an indicator to the Autotrading popularity in the Foreign exchange market.
From 2006's competition (258 participants) to 2008's competition (705 participants) the number of participants tripled, indicating an increasing popularity for Autotrading and for the MT4 platform among the retail users during these years. This year, 893 participants have already registered ahead of the championship opening. This also reinforces the assumption of the rapid growth in demand from users for AutoTrading products. FXCM recently launched the 'Strategy Trader' platform, which allows traders to generate strategies using C# syntax and to trade them automatically. ACT Forex also allows strategy coding and trading and I assume we will see more Brokerages offering Autotrading products in the coming future.
