Preparing Your EA for Maximum Performance in ATC 2010

As was the case with most of the Forex trading contests that are held on the demo accounts, in the Automated Trading Championship (ATC) 2010 it’s very important to have not only a great trading strategy implemented in the expert advisor but also an aggressive money management system that will use the maximum allowable levels to increase the account balance exponentially. Because this year ATC is conducted using MT5 version of platform and the rules are somewhat different, preparing your EA’s money management for the maximum profits has some differences.

First, it’s better to use an EA that can trade on all 12 currency pairs that are allowed by the rules. Out of two EAs with similarly profitable trading strategies one that trades only on a single currency pair won’t stand a chance against the other that would trade on all 12 pairs. Remember that almost all trading and market information functions in MQL5 take parameters for the currency pair. While you are allowed to attach your EA to only one currency pair, you’ll be able to trade all of them by specifying them all inside your EA’s code.

Second, in MetaTrader 5, there can be only one position on each currency pair. With limit of 12 currency pairs in the championship, there can be 12 simultaneously open positions for one EA. In most cases you won’t have to make any checks for the number of the positions as the buy/sell orders will just add/cut number of lots from the positions if it’s already open.

Third, each position’s size is limited to 15 standard lots. But each trading order (pending or instant) has a limit of 5 standard lots. That means that if you want to open a long position for, let’s say, 13.5 standard lots you’ll have to send two buy orders 5 lots and 1 for 3.5 lots. All you need to do is to keep track of your desired position size and determine the required number of orders (a simple cycle is easiest solution here).

If your account grows enormously during the contest the maximum total active position size you’ll be able to hold is 180 standard lots (12 positions for 15 standard lots each). I don’t think that’s really a probable outcome but the EA that will be ready to work with such big amounts will have an advantage over the ones that can’t handle that many lots.