Ray the Random Robot Scrapes Into MetaTrader 5 Trading Championship

Ray The Random Robot

Only a few short days ago we took the momentous decision to enter several automated trading competitions simultaneously. We've been burning numerous barrels of midnight oil here at Trading Towers ever since, and for the second time in as many weeks late last night we managed to successfully shoehorn some of the dumbest trading technology ever invented into our old friend Ray the Random Robot™. Then we managed to get him entered into another automated trading contest at the very last moment.

In this case it was the MetaTrader 5 Automated Trading Championship 2010, and we weren't helped by the fact that we had to reprogram Ray's artificially stupid electronic brain several times in order to try and circumvent a number of lingering "issues" with the MetaTrader 5 platform itself. We managed to upload our latest code to the contest site with slightly more than five minutes remaining until the latest (and final!) deadline was reached. At that point we'd only had a chance to run one single backtest on the latest revision of Ray's trading tournament toolkit (TTT for short). We had no time to do even one distributed optimization run to help select the angle of the dangle for Ray's control knobs, so we guessed. In the Dukascopy JForex Strategy Contest Ray has been struggling recently, getting whipsawed to death with his take profit and stop loss levels set to 50 pips. We decided to double those, dialled in 100/100, then pressed the "Save" button, committing the unfortunate Ray to use those settings for the duration of the competition, which starts in a week's time and ultimately finishes just before Christmas.

After that we tossed and turned fitfully all night, before firing up the contest site once more early this morning. Much to our relief we discovered Ray had passed MetaQuotes acceptance tests with flying colours! Not only was he one of the mere 340 out of a total of 1726 MQL5 expert advisors entered that had been approved. According to MetaQuotes backtest he had even managed to turn a starting bank of $10,000 into $44,475.58 over a period of 7 months. Here's his officially approved equity curve:

Ray the Random Robot's backtested equity curve for the MetaTrader 5 ATC 2010

If you would like to follow Ray's progress (or lack thereof!) on this, his latest and greatest adventure, then please subscribe to the MT5 ATC 2010  thread on our forum and/or keep watch on his progress on Ray's ATC contest page itself.