Hi, my EA not working again. Please check servers and client terminals. Good luck.

I guess this point illustrates perfectly what I was referring to in my earlier comments. You seem to be having a rather run of bad luck in this competition, hope that the remaining weeks of the competition are more "boring" for you.

Unfortunately my EA (Hercules) was one of the EAs affected by the outage. In fact, I am the person who brought it to the attention of the organizers. I noticed that a 'sell trigger' was missed (a trade that ultimately would have added over 9,000 to my EA's balance) and began to worry. .. the next day I saw the info regarding the outage. While it is definitely frustrating that Hercules missed such a large trade due to no fault of my or its own... there is really nothing to be done about it. This is the second "bug" that has proved detrimental to my EA. Hercules also lost a considerable amount due to the spike earlier in the competition. Had I paid an entrance fee I would likely be considerably more upset, as it is, I figure one is not able to lose money they never had... so there is really nothing to be lost. While one would hope for a level playing field it was never guaranteed by the organizers. In the end there is no point in thinking about what would have or could have been. .. what is, simply is.

Good luck and happy trading to all!

Vince

Right; it's still not clear to me which motto would tag this competition, but in any case, there won't be any more server outages ;-)

Re sharing EA: I guess this discssion should really be on "my" comment thread, or maybe on a forum somewhere, but a short note can't hurt. We (i.e., the RichPlank partnership <richplank@happyhowden.com>), plan to make the expert available, once we have verified its reliability. Thereafter it's mostly a question of the level of hands-on people want in the trading, i.e., how much they want to trust the EA (and us) :-)

Judging by your last comment, it appears that you may be beggining to understand what I am referring to. If I'm not mistaken, then we are not here to find the best performing EA, but the best performing EA in relation to the other EA's that are running. Hence, all EA's should have the same operating under the same conditions.

I'm not actually a participant in this comp, didn't get enough time to submit my EA, but am keenly following the results. I wish you luck in your entry!

EDIT: I just looked at your results and you haven't had a single loosing trade in the 6 weeks of competition. That is a phenomenal result to achieve, talk about consistency. Without stating the bleeding obvious, I'd certainly be interested in taking a look at your EA. Would you be interested in any form of sharing? saltcafe@gmail. com if you are interested in discussing this further (an ex-Sydney resident is pleading with you!)

Well, maybe I'm just weird in my idea about fairness in this competition, as I think it'd simply be based on whether or not an EA is allowed to perform as best it can, under the incidental limits of its hosting platform. This is regardless of what happens, or doesn't happen, to other EA's hosting platforms; you'll have to suffer any accidental events, but it turns towards "unfair" with intentional degradation or manipulation, since that would be something that could have been avoided.

Of course it was unfortunate that that particular server had an outage, and for sure, had that server been up on the Monday, then those EA could possibly have made trades or trade management that they certainly weren't able to do with the server down. We'll never know what could have been, and to me that's all part of the premise fo this competition.

Though, I think you are right in that with prize money at stake, the point for a contestant is not for his EA to do its best, but rather for it to be better than the others, and maybe then "the shine of a neighbors grass" should enter the dialogue. On the other hand, wouldn't every contestant want any kind of advantage he can get? Is it fair to intentionally deprive a contestant an advantage -- which ones? For instance, some EAs have made profit and other have not; the richer EA's have an advantage, and perhaps it would be fair to redistribute the total profit (or loss, really) among all? (did I mention that I'm not very experienced in trading? :-))

EDIT: I just realized that I'm not talking "one for all, all for one" here, but rather "each for their own". Hmm... maybe I'm pulled off the rails by the heat of competition (as my EA is visiting the limelight :-)).

Hmmm ... we both seem to be saying the same thing without giving up on any ground.

What I don't understand from your point of view is how can you justify the fact that one particular server was NOT working and by bringing down the other servers you would be disadvantaging the other EA's on all of those servers? That's exactly my point ... all for one and one for all.

It's just something that I can not comprehend ... after all wasn't the group of EA running on that one server that actually went down at a disadvantage compared to all of the others that were actually running without any problems?!?! Wouldn't that be unfair to those small groups of EA's.

If out of 240 EA's, 20 of them were not working for an hour (let's say) then the other 220 EA's had an extra hour of trading. They could've made money during that time ... they could've lost it, but the 20 EA's didn't get that chance to make or loose money for that time that the server was down.

Just in case I muddled it up: I'm all in favour of a fair competition. I'm merely objecting to the idea that forcing servers down would have been an action that changes something unfair to something fair. It would have given advantage to some, disadvantage to others, and been irrelevant for the rest. Not much different from not forcing them down, except that fewer EA's were meddled with.

The suggested rule is fine with me, but it doesn't make things more fair or identical; it'd just be one of the conditions of the contest. Of course the organisers will then need to make judgement calls about host operations, and whether one host "misbehaves" strongly enough so that a similar behaviour has to be forced onto the others. And it must happen concurrently of course.

Server's up/down times ARE definitely under the control of the organizers of this competition. It would be relatively simple to write a script that ping the entire pool of servers and if one of them goes down, it brings down the other as well. This would "simulate real conditions" for everybody that are the same.

I’m just proposing a solution for keeping this contest FAIR for ALL contestants!

IMHO, if this competition were for just pride and honour (monopoly money) then I wouldn't really care, but since this is supposed to be paying out some real money at the end, then I personally think that it should be be identical for all participants.

I disagree. I don't think that events that are outside of the organiser's control, and that affect some participants, should necessarily and automatically be propagated to affect all participants. To do so is not more "fair" and does not better "simulate real conditions", and I can't directly think of any multi-party competition where such a rule is used. If something happens to some people during a race, well, that's unfortunate, but it does not mean that the same thing must happen to all. At worst it would mean to call off the race and restart it.