The Most Popular Symbols

Each Participant chose a symbol for his or her Expert Advisor. The most of Participants have chosen EURUSD (141 Experts). The second place in popularity was taken by GBPUSD (70 Experts). Other symbols turned to be less popular, EURAUD and EURCHF were not used at all. The good reputation of EURUSD and GBPUSD with Participants comes from the fact that these currency pairs are well known by developers. Besides, they are characterized by rather high volatility. This allows traders to gain higher profits using them.

Fig. 1. Diagram showing how experts are distributed by symbols they are attached to.

The Most Popular Chart Timeframes

The Championship Participants chose the desired timeframe at registration. The most popular timeframe turned to be 1 hour (91 Experts). According to professional opinion, this timeframe is the most suitable. It does not have much "noise". This allows more quality in analyses of the price movements. The larger the timeframe is, the purer and clearer it is. However, no Participants have chosen weekly or monthly charts. These periods are too large for a 3-month competition. The second place was taken by the 1-minute timeframe. It was chosen by 45 developers. Unlike hourly or larger periods, this timeframe allows traders to find the "entering point" (opening a position) more precisely.

Fig. 2. Diagram showing how experts are distributed by timeframes.

Multicurrency Expert Advisors

MetaTrader 4 Client Terminal and MQL4 allow developing and using multicurrency experts. Such expert advisors receive and analyze data from any symbols and timeframes. About 6% of Expert Advisors that participate in the Championship are multicurrency ones. The other 94% are rather simple experts that work on only one currency pair. The experts that have not made any trades were excluded from calculations of this parameter.

 
Fig. 3. Ratio between multicurrency and single-currency experts.

The Amount of Closed Positions per Day

It was interesting to analyze the dynamics of orders closed (Fig. 4, the green line). Thus, a great amount of orders were closed at the beginning of the Championship. This amount exceeded 1000 orders a day. But this parameter had reached 600 by the tenth day of the competition. Then it continued to fall. This happened due to the fact, that there had been many "scalping" and very risky experts. Then they lost parts of their deposits and, therefore, the possibility to open large amounts of positions. The parameter decreased to 400 on the 37th day of the competition. 10-day moving average is shown with the red line in the graph below. It clearly shows the downtrend in the total amount of opened orders.

 
Fig 4. The dynamics of the total amount of closed positions.

Ratio between Profitable and Losing Positions

After having analyzed the profitability/unprofitableness of positions, we found out that the most of positions (53%) are profitable. About 4% of all positions were closed at their open prices (zero profit). Respectively, the other 43% of positions are losing.

 
Fig. 5. Ratio between Profitable and Losing Positions.

Although the most of positions are closed with a profit, the average profit for all orders per day most frequently turns to be negative. This is because the total loss is greater than the total profit of all positions. In other words, the average loss per position exceeds the average profit. Thus, a profitable position makes averagely $148 and a losing position makes losses of averagely $226. The graph showing the average profit changes for all positions is given in Fig. 6 as a blue line. The red line represents a 10-day moving average. It shows that the average profit gradually increases.

 
Fig. 6. Graph showing how the average profit (loss) on closed positions was changed per a Championship day. 

Expert's Profitability, the Amount of Positions and their Holding Time

To analyze the relations between the experts' profitability and the amount of positions opened by these experts, let us divide the Expert Advisors into groups. The first group will contain 25 most profitable experts according to their equities. Less profitable experts will get to the second group. The last group will consist of the most losing experts. Table 1 shows how Expert Advisors are divided into groups (the groups correspond with the List of Participants as of the 8th of November 2006). The grouping did not include disqualified experts and those not having made any trades at all.

Now we can calculate the average amount of positions opened within a month (Fig. 7). As we can see from the graph, the most profitable expert advisors make relatively few trades. At the same time, the experts from the last groups make many trades. In other words, the more trades the expert makes, the more losing this expert turns to be. For example, experts from the first group make averagely 25 trades monthly. Experts from the most losing group, group 10, do about 200. So it is not necessary to open many trades to make your Expert Advisor really profitable. On the contrary, the statistics show that profitable expert advisors place orders very rarely. Besides, to find the precise entering point, these experts sift the market situation in order to open positions for certain.

Fig 7. Graph showing the amounts of opened positions depending on groups.

Now let us calculate the average position holding time for each group. The weekends are excluded at this calculation since there is no trading on such days. The graph that shows this relation is given in Fig. 8. We can see from this graph that the most profitable experts have the maximal position holding time, which makes approximately 60 hours. And vice versa, the losing experts have the minimal position holding time, which makes averagely 15 hours. This means that profitable expert advisors close losing positions later than losing experts. The profitable expert advisors prefer to hold losing positions waiting for a reversal in the trend. As statistics confirm, they manage to do it.

 
Fig 8. Graph of the average position holding time related to the groups.

Ratio between Profitable and Losing Expert Advisors

We continue watching the amount of profitable and losing expert advisors started in the article named General Statistics for the First 4 Weeks of the Automated Trading Championship 2006. Fig. 9 shows that the ratio between profitable and losing experts has not changed significantly. But the amount of profitable experts has decreased.

 
Fig 9. The Amount of Profitable and Losing Expert Advisors. 

Average Equity of Expert Advisors

The average equity of experts continues to fall (Fig. 10). This means that experts lose averagely. Equities of profitable experts grow very slowly and those of the losing experts have stabilized at $6500.

Fig. 10. Graph showing the average equity for all Experts, for profitable and losing Experts.

Conclusions:

1. Experts that trade on multicurrency charts are in the minority (about 6%). The most Expert Advisors trade on only one currency pair.
2. More than a half of all Expert Advisors close positions with profits, but the average profit on all positions frequently turns to be negative.
3. Profitable Expert Advisors are characterized by insignificant amounts of trades made (averagely, 25 trades monthly) and by rather long average position holding time (about 60 hours or 2.5 days).