What is the situation with trading in New Zealand?
I use a US-based broker. There are at least one or two brokers operating in New Zealand, but I preferred the package offered by the US broker. I don't personally know any other New Zealand traders, although we seem to be well represented in this competition for a country of such a small population.

One feature of living in New Zealand and trading is that you live at GMT+12. You get to sleep on Monday morning and you can trade on Saturday morning if you feel so inclined. Long lunch breaks are also recommended, particularly when volatility is down, the period from GMT0 to GMT3 is often about as exciting as watching grass grow.

You put the Green Peace URL-link in your profile. What is your connection to this organization?
Ha, ha, no connection, just a cause that is worthy of support. Forex should teach you that humans can't predict the future, no matter how hard we try. Hence we must be cautious with that which we can't afford to lose.

What advantages does the automated trading bring, in your opinion?
A computer can make millions/billions of calculations every second. I cannot do this, even when I concentrate really hard. Of course, they may not all be helpful calculations...

What do you think about whether automated trading will replace the manual trading one day?
Sure, just as soon as computers achieve digital sentience and beat the Turing Test (the Turing Test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Professor Alan Turing in 1950. - MetaQuotes note). Failing this I think the flexibility of the human mind will always be competitive.

What is the most important thing to be considered when you develop an Expert Advisor?
For the competition, my first consideration was how much profit I was going to aim for. I did a small amount of research into the results of other competitions to get a feel of what I should be aiming for even before I had considered what the EA would be. Then I started thinking about what would be the most likely prevailing market conditions over the period of the competition and how I could exploit that to reach my objective profit. The result is the Eurobull, very simple, very aggressive.

For trading real money, I always like to remember that you can't beat a random walk with mathematics. Your EA must encompass some fundamental truth about market behavior for it to be consistently successful. That knowledge of market behavior must come from you, the human. Throwing together poorly understood indicators or trusting in parameter optimization is not a way to short circuit the process.

You chose EURUSD in the Championship. Why?
Well it wouldn't be a very good EuroBull if it didn't trade the euro, would it? It was a choice that I could have made either way between EURUSD or GBPUSD. I think my decision was eventually tipped in favor of the euro by a vague feeling the pound might also start being haunted by a real estate bubble in sympathy with the US.

Your Expert Advisor opens few positions, but they are rather profitable. Tell us, please, about the principles of your Expert's trading. What indicators are used in it?
I published my code, it is on display. My EA uses the principle that it exists, therefore it should buy euros. Few trades with large Stop Loss and Take Profit seemed to be the best way of trading a multi-month trend.

Your Expert Advisor uses only one type of operations - BUY. Why?
Well, this comes back to the analysis I made about the conditions we were likely to encounter over the course of the competition. It was an analysis done purely on fundamentals, had I looked slightly closer at the technical analysis, perhaps I would have told my EA to wait for the bottom of the channel before launching its assault. Then I might not have been massacred in the first couple of weeks as I was, but hindsight is always easy. I chose the three-month period 15/2/06 to 15/5/06 to test my competition EA on as that represented my best guess on conditions. The market trended sharply in favour of the euro during this period, it quickly became obvious that eliminating short trades altogether improved profit potential.

Some Participants predicted your Expert Advisor to lose its deposit very quickly. What did the test show? What was the largest loss?
Well, if they felt the EURUSD was heading downhill through the bottom of its channel I hope they didn't place too much money on it. It was fair enough to make these comments, this EA really does require a very narrow set of conditions to find traction.

The testing was naturally pretty positive due to the test period being a very friendly set of conditions. That is the whole point, really.

You do not use Take Profits. What is the principle, on which your Expert Advisor closes profitable positions?
It only closes positions when it detects it has enough equity to scale up the size of its position. Hence, it is not chasing a fixed price target as it changes every time another swap is charged. I also had slight concerns about the behavior of TP in a market that gaps in your favor, perhaps this was in the Rules and I should have read them more thoroughly.

Michael, there was a time when your Expert held about 10 000 in opened positions. Was it not enough? Why were not these positions closed?
The target I decided right at the start before I even began coding was approximately 100 000. Now that it has all of the 15 lots open that it is allowed, it could potentially run up more than 60 000 in open positions before closing anything. This would require EURUSD to head up to 1.37, however. Like I said, it is aggressive.

Some Expert writers place pending orders. What is your opinion about such orders? Why do not you use them?
In all my experts I am always looking to replace market orders with pending orders. For this competition, however, the Rules state you can only have a maximum of three open and pending orders. Thus for an EA like mine, that constantly has open orders, there is less room in the budget for pending orders. I could have done it when I was trading less than three orders and it would have saved me pips. My program suffers a few such inefficiencies around its scaling of positions, a bit more polish wouldn't have gone astray. Guilty as charged.

Is your Expert Advisor risky, in your opinion?
Constantly plowing back all the profit and scaling up the position is pure suicide trading on a real account. But that is not relevant, this is a competition, over 250 competitors, and only three walk away with anything. You do whatever it takes to maximize your chances to be in that Top Three. I'm not sure you can talk about risk in the context of the competition, risk implies you might lose something, but here there is only a chance to gain for those who beat the odds.

Your Expert Advisor has sharply gained the lead on the 24th of November due to the US$ fall. Can you predict its further behavior?
The EURUSD will be minimum 1.35. There is a giant pool of nervous people with dollar exposure to catch anything that looks like a retrace and there is no one left standing who will trade against any US release that comes out with a negative aspect. Trust me we are going up.

Do you think your Expert Advisor will take a prize place?
Yes, definitely, preferably all three prizes... (Smiling) Really, given the behavior of my EA, this is the previous question reworded. Does the dollar go up or down? This is not an EA that lets someone else beat it. It goes for the win or goes down in flames.

What do the Championship results give you? What conclusions have you made for yourself?
That the competition has been so open makes it very interesting. Seeing the strengths and weaknesses of each EA as it plays out over three months of live testing can potentially save you huge amounts of time over doing your own analysis.

Thank you for your answers, Michael, and we wish you lots of luck in the Championship and in your real trading.