Ray the Random Robot Gets Depressed at Myfxbook

For the last month or so Ray the Random Robot™ has been involved in a friendly competition with RAI, a cousin of his conceived in the laboratory of Dr. T, who installed some artificial intelligence in the space between the ears where Ray keeps his artificial stupidity.  Both "robots" were entered in the February 2012 Vantage FX/myfxbook trading contest, and myfxbook have just announced the final results on their blog.  Having read that blog post, and then checked his own final standing in the competition, Ray is now suffering from a terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side and is hiding in a corner of his room. He's refusing to talk to anyone, least of all me. I'll try to explain on Ray's behalf the cause of his current psychological problems.

Only a few short days ago things looked so much brighter for him, and Ray was quietly confident of being in front of RAI by the time the final whistle blew. The competition rules stated that:

• All open positions will be automatically liquidated at the end of the contest.
• The top 3 placed participants of the contest are those with the highest percentage gain at the end of the contest period, after liquidation.

On top of that it was only on February 20th when myfxbook announced, again on their blog, that:

We’re excited to announce a very anticipated and requested change – equity based drawdown. As you might know, the drawdown calculation up until now was balance based, however that isn’t the most accurate way of measuring drawdown since equity can move drastically while the balance remains the same.

Quite so! However despite all those fine words, according to the table of results of the competition on the myfxbook site this morning Ray is in 175th position out of 2700, with a "gain" of 51.09% over the month:

Ray the Random Robot finishes the myfxbook/Vantage FX trading contest in 175th position

whereas RAI is up in 111th position with a "gain" of 81.23%:

RAI the Robot finishes the myfxbook/Vantage FX trading contest in 111th position

There was some sort of technical glitch at the start of the second week of the contest, and it now looks as though there was another one at the last moment also.  None of Ray's final six trades were liquidated at the end of the contest, and it seems as though the same thing applied to all the other contestants too.  If the rules had been adhered to he would actually have finished the contest with an equity gain of 35.5% following a maximum equity drawdown of 29.11%, compared to RAI's final equity loss of 20.53% following a drawdown of 77%. The winners did much better than either Ray or RAI of course. Here's how the top ten got on:

The balance curves of the top ten competitors in the myfxbook/Vantage FX trading contest

The winner achieved a monthly gain of 5254.37% following a drawdown of 79.13%. Now that I've put the record straight on his behalf I hope Ray will emerge from his self imposed isolation and start talking to RAI and I again very soon. After all, there is another myfxbook MetaTrader trading competition starting in a few days time and, as they themselves point out, there is "zero risk" and "you have nothing to lose".

Let's all hope things run a bit more smoothly next time around.