Hello Ahmed. We are very pleased to see you among Participants of Automated Trading Championship 2007. Unfortunately, your Expert Advisor did not manage to take a place in the Top Three last year. Could you comment on this?
Thanks, it was my pleasure to be among the Participants of Automated Trading Championship 2006. My Expert Advisor (MaChannel) didn't act as planned in the Championship because of a lot of factors:

• No EA will work in the same way with different brokers. For instance, my EA is still gaining profit with another broker till now (more than 2000 pips in USDCHF),
• No EA will work in the same way on different times. I mean the market has seasons, and the Expert Advsior which work for October will not work in January, and
• Moving average-based Expert Advsior are broker-dependant.

Why, in your opinion, you lost: wrong strategy, poor realization, errors in money management, bad luck or something else?
Good money-management is undoubtedly the key to success, for any Expert Advisor. Unfortunately the deficiency in this area was one of my failings. The main failing arose from not testing the EA with the contest’s platform. Had I the opportunity to have done so, I would have refined the parameters according to broker behavior and data. I don't think 'bad luck' was involved

You say that you learned the lesson. Can you reveal any conclusions drawn?
The lesson is a very simple one, but maybe it helps traders seeking the Holy Grail: "The Forex market is moody, and you cannot use inflexible rules with this kind of market". My Expert Advisor settings may work now for a specific time and a specific broker, but, for sure, it won’t work for a different time and broker. I promise, in this contest, to show you just how much I learned from the lesson.

Well, Ahmed. That’s enough for ATC 2006. Let’s speak about the present. You keep developing Expert Advisors. Could you, please, tell us more about your actual developments?
I have spent a lot of my time teaching MQL4 and developing free tools: Expert Advisors; Indicators; Scripts and MetaTrader add-ons. It has been a pleasure to be able to help so many and I have made a lot of friends around the worlds (most of them are my clients now). But who will pay my bills? I now spend most of my time developing MQL4 projects for a fee. I've developed tens of Expert Advisors for tens of clients, and my motto is "You must get what you paid for". I' intend to resume offering free help again soon, in my newly established forum, www.codersguru.com/forum.

That’s a good news, let congratulate you, Ahmed, to your new forum. Can you describe any of your new Expert Advisors?
I have little time to develop much for my own purposes, because all the time goes to my clients’ programs (and my clients’ programs are their own, of course).

I can talk about one I intend to participate with in the contest. I used to trade the news and I found it one of the most profitable trading methods, if done at the right time. My new Expert Advisor, "News Hunter", will recognize the best time to take the trade; the rest is down to effective Money Management.

Very interesting, Ahmed. But how can an Expert Advisor using only news make a decision about in what direction to open a position?
Good question indeed! Any news-based Expert Advisor uses an external text feed telling it the time of the news and the weight (i.e., how important it is). Most news-related Expert Advisors place straddle orders (one above the market price and one below the market price) and wait until the price takes off. My Expert Advisor will not use any of external texts - it has a built-in algorithm to tell when and where the price is going to take off. I think I’ve said too much about the "News Hunter".

Ahmed, so we would like to ask you why you left “traditional” EAs based on technical analysis and developed an EA based on news analysis. Do you think technical analysis is not enough?
Technical analysis is widely used, especially Support/Resistance lines and trend breaks. I believe that technical analysis is a very complex method of trading and very hard to be automated. News trading is less complex and with fewer requirements. My Expert Advisor is based on the market reaction at the time of the news, a little like technical analysis approach but easier to program.

What is your new Expert Advisor’s profit factor?
I'm still searching for the best settings that fit the platform of the Championship. My current settings yield a profit factor greater than 1.6, but I'm sure I will have to further optimize it, if I want to compete successfully in this round of the Championship.

It would be very interesting to know about your vision of a profitable Expert Advisor’s money-management system. What system of money management did you choose for News Hunter? Why?
Trading the news is like scalping the market, where the trader looks for few pips with a large lot size. The key to success, in such systems, is using a narrow stop loss or a hedging system to avoid drawdown.

The Rules of the Championship itself (like the maximum lot size and the maximum opened trades) is a boundary for the money management strategy of the contestant.

In your last year’s interview, you said you wanted to publish a book on MQL4. How are things going with this?
It's one of my dreams, but where to find the time to write it? I want to write a professional book, like the those written for a different language (e.g. Easy Language) . I have found the best approach for doing this was to start my courses. The book will grow, little by a little, while I am teaching my clients about MQL4 each day.

MQL4, or programming in general, is not only variables, functions and syntax. Programming is a method of thinking and that's what I want to teach in my book. In short, the answer is that I'm still working on this book.

How would you estimate general level of Expert Advisors that participated in the last year’s Championship? Do you think Expert Advisors of this year will be of a different quality?
Most of the Expert Advisors that have participated in the first Championship were, in my opinion, for testing purposes. The Idea of the Championship itself was a new one and I believe most of the participations weren't so serious; perhaps they were somehow doubtful about the idea.

I'm sure this year will be 100% different in the quality of Expert Advisors and you will find the intention of winning very obvious.

Thank you for your interesting interview. Good luck!