Good morning, Andrey. Please tell us a little about yourself: where you are from, how long you are acquainted with Forex, what success you achieved in live trading.

By occupation I am an electronic engineer. I got a technical degree as a candidate of technics. I happened to learn about Forex in 2005 when I needed to exchange Taiwan dollars to US dollars for a trip to Russia to visit my relatives. A question arose about choosing the exchange time. So I remembered the word Forex. Using this key word in search engines I found the website www.forex.com. The website is owned by Gain Capital – this is where I opened a demo account and later a live mini account.

But after a month of a constant staring at charts on my monitor I understood that it couldn’t be done 24 hours a day. A little later when studying materials devoted to trading I very often came across information about MetaTrader 4 platform. And I started to study it for writing my own Expert Advisors and indicators.

I made a decision to use MetaTrader 4 platform and chose one of the largest brokers in the Forex market working with this platform. This was InterbankFX – one of the ATC 2008 sponsors. I still trade with this broker – I trade minimal sums on a small live account since 2006. I haven’t earned money yet, but the development of Expert Advisors became my hobby. Some people solve puzzles, others play computer games and my hobby is solving logical tasks that are so numerous in the Forex market.

Can you tell us about the last logical task that you had to solve in Forex?

Well, suppose I was wrong in the number when talking about logical tasks. Actually, there is only one unconventional task – making profit under any market conditions.

You are our regular Participant. In 2006 you submitted a very simple Expert Advisor working with one currency pair. In 2007 you presented a completely different multicurrency EA. Last year you wrote you wanted to estimate its potential by sending it to the Championship. What was your opinion about the EA after the ATC 2007?

True, I participate in all Championships conducted by your company. As for my second Expert Advisor that I submitted in 2007, it participates once again in the current Championship. I changed only one thing in it – removed limitation for an account number and validity period. And I published its source code for all persons interested.

The idea of sending a losing Expert Advisor consists in the intention of getting sure that the win in the Championship depends mainly on a chance (market conditions during the Championship), and not only on the Expert Advisor itself. According to all tests my Expert Advisor is a “loser” and this cannot be changed. It is already proved that an EA cannot have regular profit on a martingale using a fixed lot size. It means all Participants of the Championship are playing just bingo, because the number of positions opened is restricted in the Championship.

And it will be funny if my EA shows positive results against the last-year loss. Actually, I think my Expert Advisor is not better than an EA based on two moving averages. It only has a block choosing currency pairs, for which the difference between two moving averages will be maximal. And in case of a flat or pivot it is doomed to lose.

I think that taking into account the limited number of positions opened chances to win are equal for a simple EA based on 2 moving averages and a complicated neuronet EA.

Andrey, you have written about virtual stop mechanisms of your Expert Advisor. When are they activated?

I understood long ago that placing of a strict StopLoss in any form would kill an EA irrespective of its calculation methods. After numerous experiments I concluded that a position, both losing and winning, should be exited according to the current profit or loss of a summing position of opened orders. For the Championship my EA calculates the number of loss and profit pips for all positions. And a totally profitable position is exited when a certain profit level is achieved, e.g. 100 points (this number is only made up).

The EA exits loss positions when it gets evidences that there are pairs more favorable for trading and a trend has changed to a contrary. I.e. the EA searches pairs with the maximal difference of moving averages among three pairs. These three pairs may change depending on market conditions. If a loss-making position is opened for a pair that during calculations was not among the three leaders, my EA pitilessly closes this position.

In general, my idea is that one should make money in the market. In other words one should exit a position with a certain profit and not wait till calculated TakeProfit or StopLoss values are achieved that can be hit or not hit with a difference of only 1 point which is a subject of discussion of beginning traders.

Irrespective of the method according to which TakeProfit or StopLoss is calculated, the Forex market is likely to visit both points. It is only a matter of time.

According to my opinion about markets, the present time does not contain any information about future. In other words, various ideas connected with channel constructing, showing direction of future movements of currency pairs based on the current trend are not something that can tell you about the future. The only thing that the present tells you about is that current statistical characteristics will not change greatly due to certain factors influencing the market. And this is the only thing that can be exploited in the market for getting the profit of 50-100% per year using a standard leverage offered by brokers.

Your Expert Advisor has a very simple mechanism of position opening – 0.3 lots per each $10,000 of the Balance. Have you ever considered other algorithms for the position size calculation? Or is it the case “Best is the enemy of the good enough”? Many participants use large volumes. Why don’t you share their opinion?

I think that in conditions of the existing Championship limitation of three open positions, use of any schemes of position volume is meaningless, because this limitation is an attempt to win on a martingale. As well as in live trading I do not use calculations of a position size. I simply select, for example, the minimal volume and then my EA increases the number of positions opened depending on market conditions.

Tony Manso, like you, thinks that one should not place fixed stop levels. What do you think about his Expert Advisor?

Unfortunately I can tell nothing about his EA, because I haven’t seen its code and don’t know its idea. The only thing I dislike in it is the small number of trades (15 for the current moment, 24th of October) and the large size of lots already from the start (from 2 lots). At the start I used only 0.3 lots and thought it the maximal risk possible even in the Championship conditions. Personally I like another EA – that of a Participant from Italy adamoliberato. He also uses a superaggressive policy of market entering but at least the number of trades is much larger.

I simply do not believe that an EA increasing its account thrice in 2-3 trades can be viable. I believe in EAs that trade actively and allow getting some statistics of their operation (more than 1000 trades) within a reasonable period of testing in real time scale.

Your Expert Advisor is based on cluster indicators and you refer to the article Theoretical Basics of Building Cluster Indicators for FOREX. Do you think this area has perspectives in trading? Are cluster indicators more accurate, in your opinion?

No, in my opinion they have no perspective, because they are based on the attempt to predict future based on the known present movement. And this contradicts my principle that “there is no future in present”. They are not better than EAs based on two moving averages. They are only the final stage of the development of such EAs. This is what was interesting to me in a certain period of time.

You have published the opened source code. Why have you done this?

I believe that the Championship idea of MQL4 popularization, as well as the idea that robots can trade without human intervention and make profit need convincing proofs for potential users. And the main proof here is the open source code of an Expert Advisor. This eliminates disbelief in “blackbox EAs” of those who know very little about the automated trading. When people see some account ratings even with reports of trades, but know nothing of what helped to achieve such results, they do not consider ratings of Participants a sound proof of a possible profit-making automated trading. And by opening the source code I just wanted to help your company in the promotion of the idea of automated trading. Because development of Expert Advisors is really very interesting!

Your Expert Advisor code contains the following comment: “Close an order with a profit because of the hysteresis effect on a pair”. Is this a term from electronics? What does it mean in your EA operation?

Right, this is a technical term. Its meaning in this context is the following: if the difference between two moving averages is in absolute value lower than a certain level, an opened position is closed if it makes profit. Besides, in such moments the system does not open any orders for this pair even if it is among the top three. So, this is a small attempt to protect my EA from a flat; and it is widely used in automated trading.

As for the open source code, in your profile you have written the following: “In my established opinion all strategies that are in open access will not help you earn. My open strategy is the same”. It looks like self-deprecating humor.

I think this is just reality. People that can really make money in Forex do not communicate in forums or participate in contests – it is not interesting to them to observe how other people try to solve the task that they have already solved. What’s more, “money likes silence” they say. And forums are only a start where one can get help in some difficulties that a beginning EA-writer can meet – help of those who met such difficulties earlier.

Andrey, thank you for the interview. Good luck!