The MetaTrader 5 Automated Trading Championship

MetaQuotes, the Russian company that produces the MetaTrader forex trading platform, has announced that it is reviving its automated trading championship in 2010. According to the post on the MQL5 website:

The main purpose of the competition is promoting the idea of the automated trading and the new development environment MetaQuotes Language 5 (MQL5). The total prize of the Automated Trading Championship 2010 is 80,000 US dollars.

MetaQuotes started the championship in 2006, and ran it from the beginning of October to the end of December each year until 2008. However in 2009 the championship did not take place. According to MetaQuotes this was because:

We are engaged in the development of a new trading platform MetaTrader 5; its release is planned for this year. All our forces are now concentrated on the platform release, and soon it will be presented to you for beta testing. Focusing all our resources on this release, we don't want to be distracted from this target.

Whilst they may well not have wanted to be distracted from developing their new platform, something apart from running a trading championship seems to have delayed the progress of MetaTrader 5.  It certainly wasn't working properly by the end of 2009, and back at the beginning of last December MetaQuotes were saying that beta testing of MetaTrader 5 was expected to be finished by February 1st 2010.  It's now well into April, and MetaTrader 5 is still in public beta testing. What is more the latest version of the client terminal (mine is now up to build 264, dated April 16th), still doesn't contain any equivalent of the MetaTrader 4 history centre and strategy tester. It's pretty difficult to build a profitable automated trading system if you have no means of backtesting a strategy whilst it is under development. Unless MetaQuotes release these tools quickly, their 2010 championship is likely to turn out to be at least as much of a disappointment as the 2009 non-event, and the MQL5 language itself.