Company news

April 1-3 2009 the MetaTrader 5 Workshop was conducted in Kazan. Technical specialists of some of our clients were invited to this event. The main purpose of the meeting was the discussion of the MetaTrader 5 platform that is currently being developed.

Our company was represented by Renat Fatkhullin and Alexander Saidullin, as well as heads of all international offices of MetaQuotes Software Corp. We invited representatives of brokerage companies from all over the world and special guests.

The following issues were the subject of discussions during the meeting:

1. Architecture of the MetaTrader 5 platform.
2. Further development of the platform.
3. Using MetaTrader 5 in stock markets, as well as for trading futures and options.
4. Back office, integration with TeamWox and other software.

The platform and its presentation were shown at the MetaTrader 5 Workshop.

According to the results of the meeting held, the following decisions have been made:

1. In summer 2009 we are planning to start the public beta-testing of the MetaTrader 5 client terminal and the new language for programming trading strategies MQL5.
2. In autumn the beta-testing of MetaTrader 5 back-office components will be started.
3. The main efforts of MetaTrader 5 developers will be concentrated on the maximal flexibility of the platform. "Our platform must be able to easily integrate with the largest possible number of other software, stocks and liquidity providers. This is one of the most important tasks we are going to work on", - Alexander Saidullin, the chief developer of MetaTrader 5, concluded.

We would like to thank all those who came to the Workshop and participated in the discussion of the new platform. We are sure that now we will be able to make MetaTrader 5 maximally convenient for the business of our clients.

On April 5, 2009 the «demo.metaquotes.net» server will be shut down. However, the History Center with the minute history will continue to operate.

From this day onwards, our company will discontinue using the demo server. There is a great number of companies working with the MetaTrader 4 platform at the moment, so we don't find it reasonable to maintain our own server.

We are glad to announce that on the 1st of February our company starts the distribution of TeamWox in all markets. Now any company from any industry will be able to purchase and use the system in their everyday activities. Especially for this product we have created the website www.teamwox.com where all persons interested can find information about the system. Besides usual means, the website offers two possibilities: to become a developer of modules for the system and to become a partner in its distribution.

Using TeamWox SDK, one can develop additional modules for the system or adapt the existing ones to various requirements. Such applications can be then distributed on commercial bases. If you have programming skills and are willing to make some money, become a developer of modules. We offer free help to developers by publishing information about authors and their modules on the TeamWox official website.

Our partners will help us to distribute the system for the fee of 20% of a sales contract price. All relations will be executed on the agreement bases. The closed part of the website will contain all the accounting information on sales and financial operations of our partner. This is a rather easy and quick method to earn additional money.

All you need to do in order to become a developer of modules or our partner is to fill out a corresponding form on the website. After that our managers will contact you and provide you with all the details.

Best regards,
MetaQuotes Software Corp.

For 13 weeks trading robot of Participants of the third annual Automated Trading Championship struggled for the main prize. The Championship gathered Expert Advisors with different trading strategies, with various mechanisms and numerous sets of trading tools. Thanks to Participants, we learned new possibilities of the automated trading. For many Participants this was the time to test and estimate their Expert Advisors without the interference into their work. Now all their worries are over, all Expert Advisors are stopped. Now this is the most pleasant time of the ATC 2008 - time to name the Winners and hand them their prizes.

1. The first place in the ATC 2008 was taken by the Participant from Bulgaria Kiril Kartunov (Liliput). His Expert Advisor first entered the Top Ten list already on the second week of the contest and then never left it. It moved higher and higher. And here is the result - it is on the first position. Kiril thinks that simplicity is the key, because it bears very important information. His Expert Advisor is based on the long-term strategy. It has executed not so many trades - 27; 16 of them were profitable and helped him to win making his balance larger than 169 thousands USD. His profit factor is equal to 3,28. Kiril gets the award of The First Place in the Automated Trading Championship and 40,000 USD from Forex Capital Markets LLC (FXCM). Congratulations, Kiril!


2. The second prize was the subject of a tense struggle till the last moments of the Championship. Such a situation occurs each year. Shortly before all EAs were stopped the Participant Vladimir Lekhovitser (PrizmaL) from Israel appeared on this place. The company where Vladimir works is the developer of Artificial Intelligence for the automated trading in Forex and Futures. But the Expert Advisor PrizmaL does not contain AI. It works on the basis of another tool - Genetic Algorithm. Using this algorithm, time bands and the behavior of EURGBP were defined. This Expert Advisor executed 1 113 trades, 93% of which were profitable. But its profit factor is not high - 1.86. The EA earned 157,000 USD. Vladimir gets the award for The Second Place in the Automated Trading Championship 2008 and 25,000 US dollars from Interbank FX LLC. Vladimir, congratulations to you!


3. The third place was taken by Nauris Zukas (abeiks) from Latvia. His Expert Advisor Indian executed 595 trades; more than 90% of them were profitable. The profit factor of the Expert Advisor is 2.33. These are quite good results. Nauris gets the award for The Third Place in the Automated Trading Championship 2008 and 15,000 dollars from FXDD. Congratulations, Nauris!

We congratulate Winners and all Participants of the Automated Trading Championship 2008! For the help in the organization of the Championship, we would like to thank our Sponsors: Forex Capital Markets LLC (FXCM), Interbank FX LLC, FXDD and the TRADERS' magazine!

On the website of the Automated Trading Championship 2008, an article Automated Trading Championship 2008 Has Started! has been published. The 1st of October 2008 is the starting date of the Automated Trading Championship 2008. All preparatory stages are behind us, registration and check of Expert Advisors are over. 705 Participants are on the start line. Now Expert Advisors will have to prove that they are able to trade and gain profit without human interference.

The article was published on the website of Automated Trading Championship 2008 in the News section.

Sponsors of the Automated Trading Championship 2008 are FXCM (Forex Capital Markets LLC), Interbank FX LLC (IBFX), FXDD and the TRADERS’ magazine. The organizer of the Championship is MetaQuotes Software Corp.

MetaQuotes Software Corp. is glad to announce that the registration for participation in the Automated Trading Championship 2008 starts on the 1st of July! From now on till the 19th of September, 2008 all persons interested can register for participation in the contest. Participation in the Championship is free.

Expert Advisors that fully comply with the Rules of the Championship are eligible to participate. Here is the comment of Stanislav Starikov, the Championship jury member, regarding the changes in the Championship Rules: "To provide equal conditions to all Participants and to prevent the admission of frauds to the Championship, we had to make the Rules of the Championship even more stringent, as compared to the previous-year contest. We would like to recommend to all the would-be Participants to read the Rules very carefully and not to violate them."

We wish all prospective Participants a successful competition and good luck in the forthcoming Championship!

Sponsors of the ATC 2008 are:FXCM (Forex Capital Markets LLC), Interbank FX LLC (IBFX) and FXDD. Media sponsor is the TRADERS’ magazine. The organizer of the Championship is MetaQuotes Software Corp.

MetaQuotes Software Corp., Forex Capital Markets LLC (FXCM), Interbank FX LLC (IBFX), FXDD and the TRADERS' magazine are glad to announce the start of preparations for the third annual Automated Trading Championship 2008. Just as one year before, the registration for participating in the contest will start on the 1st of July 2008. The Championship itself will start on the 1st of October 2008.

Unlike many other similar contests, not traders themselves participate in the Automated Trading Championship 2008, but their Expert Advisors - programs for automated trading. These programs will be competing within three months for the Title of the Best Expert Advisor of the Year and for the prize of totally 80 000 US dollars.

In the recent years, automated trading became widely spread. More and more traders choose automated trading systems for their numerous advantages. Unlike a human person, an Expert Advisor can make a huge amount of calculations within a short period of time. This allows the program to process more information per time unit, to obtain more reliable predictions of price changes, and make better trade decisions.

Besides, like all other computer programs, Expert Advisors are affectless. They operate according a clear algorithm and do not deviate from it guided by feelings. Expert Advisors know no tiredness either, they can analyze market situations in the twenty-four-hour mode and make independent trade decisions.

As a relatively new technology, automated trading has acquired its non-believers. Until quite recently, Expert Advisors were considered not to be able to earn money on the market without trader's intervention. Later on, some traders started to take up the position that automated trading is less profitable than the manual one. However, both statements were overthrown by the Automated Trading Championship. The Expert Advisor of the Winner of the first Championship managed to increase its deposit 3.5 times within 3 months, the Winner of the second Championship increased his deposit 13 times. Expert Advisors proved that they could earn really much.

One of the main purposes of the Championship is to raise the development of Expert Advisors among traders to a higher level. For this purpose, the course of the Championship will always be covered on the contest's website. It is an interactive internet resource where you can find a great variety of technical details about Expert Advisors behavior and the detailed reports of EAs. Moreover, statistical reports, articles and interviews with developers will be published on the website of the Championship over the whole period of the contest. These materials will help you to better understand the secrets behind the success of one Expert Advisor or another, the errors made by the authors of Expert Advisors and how to avoid those errors.

The registration for participation in the Automated Trading Championship 2008 will be started on 1st of July and last till the 19th of September; the competition will be conducted from the 1st of October till the 26th of December 2008. MetaQuotes Software Corp and the competition Sponsors invite all persons interested to take part in the ATC 2008. The win in the Championship will provide you with the title of the Best Developer of Expert Advisors 2008 and the first prize – 40,000 US dollars.

With support from MetaQuotes Software Corp., the first textbook on programming in MQL4 is available now. The book is published on our website http://book.mql4.com/ru/ and is available free-of-charge.

The book is offered to a wide readership interested in developing automated trading programs for MetaTrader 4 Clent Terminal. At the same time, however, thanks to the new terms introduced in the book, it will be also interesting for experienced developers of automated trading systems.

Sergey Kovalyov, the book author, thinks that «the development of applications for MetaTrader 4 Client Terminal requires the knowledge of MQL4. This textbook will equip you with useful knowledge about how to create your own Expert Advisors, scripts and indicators and, with their help, turn your ideas, your algorithms of profitable trading, into reality.»

Nowadays, the advantages of automated trading, a twenty-four-hour management of large amounts of data and complete automation of the trading process, are easy to see. Besides, an automated trading strategy doesn't include the human factor in trading altogether. For example, the recently held Automated Trading Championship 2007 demonstrated the opportunities provided by programming of traders’ own strategies. The leader of the Championship increased his initial deposit 13 times within just 3 months! The books tells about how to write your own trading strategy using MQL4.

Table of Contents:
— Preface
— Table of Contents
— Introduction to MQL4
— Language Basics
— MetaEditor
— Program in MQL4
— Operators
— Variables
— Programming in MQL4
— Trade Operations
— Simple Programs in MQL4
— Standard Functions
— Creation of a Normal Program
— About Complex Programs
— Appendix

12 weeks of the most interesting and exciting event in the world of automated trading, the 2007 Automated Trading Championship, are over. The championship is finished with all Expert Advisors fully stopped. Now's the time to name the winners and hand out prizes.

1. The first place winner of the 2007 Automated Trading Championship is Olexandr Topchylo (Better) from Ukraine. Olexandr participated in the 2006 Championship, but without success. Having learned the lessons of the past contest, Olexandr has won with a great lead ahead of others this time. For five weeks in a row, he held the first position in the Top Ten chart. Olexandr will receive the The First Place 2007 Automated Trading Championship award and the prize of $40,000 from ODL Securities Limited. Congratulations, Olexandr!

2. The last two weeks saw a tough struggle for the second place. It was taken by William Boatright (wackena), a US national, with $55,000  recorded just one day before the end of the contest. He states that timeframes coded in his Expert Advisor make the latter more reliable. William will receive The Second Place 2007 Automated Trading Championship award and $25,000 from Alpari (UK) Limited. Congratulations, William!

3. The third place was taken by Vasiliy Lavrinenko (PegasMaster) from Ukraine. His Expert Advisor, Pegas, slowly but surely made to the top of the table and hit Top Ten only in the last several weeks. Though the Expert Advisor went on quite steadily, its profit was far below that of the leaders. However, the Expert Advisor managed to add nearly $10,000 to its balance and landed the third place on the last day of the Championship. Vasiliy will receive The Third Place 2007 Automated Trading Championship award and $15,000 from FXDD. Congratulations, Vasiliy!

We would like to thank all the participants and sponsors of the 2007 Automated Trading Championship and wish each and everyone a very happy and successful New Year.

MetaQuotes Software Corp. was founded on the 27th of November 2000. Its only activity was and still is development of software for financial markets. The company has achieved much within the last 7 years. We have developed 4 trading platforms, 4 mobile terminals, created 4 development environments for automated trading, issued one book, and are preparing another one for publishing. Besides, we are organizers of two world championships — Automated Trading Championship 2006/2007.

When developing our trading platforms, we always do our best to make them really world-beating. We care of both their functionality and efficiency, and friendliness. For this reason, we always spent really much time and efforts on development of user interfaces of our software. In order to provide users with the most functional tools, we were always interested in knowing traders’ and brokers’ opinions, welcomed their comments and suggestions. All this wasn’t in vain. Today, due to its characteristics, our MetaTrader 4 is the most commonly used trading platform in the world, and traders choose our trading terminals most frequently.

Technological development produced the need and the possibility to create client terminals for mobile devices. We were among the first to provide traders with mobile terminals having developed them for our trading platform, MetaTrader 3. The programs were highly estimated by users.

Of course, the demand was not really high at that time, but it kept growing, so we received evidence that had been an upcoming trend in the field of trading technologies. Taking up the development of trading platform MetaTrader 4, we were sure that mobile terminals would be in high demand. Several years of working in this direction produced good results. Today, mobile technologies in trading are perceived as a matter of course, and one in ten of our traders use them in their daily activities.

One more upcoming trend in development was automated trading. Even our second platform, MetaQuotes, included in 2001 an integrated programming language for writing trading strategies, MetaQuotes Language (MQL). Programs intended for automated trading were called ’Expert Advisors’. Traders used them to automate their analyses of price movements and their trading as such, as well as to create their custom indicators.

At that time, a group of our traders writing their own Expert Advisors (EAs) came into being and started to grow. When developing the next platforms, we did not omit to support them and continuously improved the programming language and the environment in whole. Striving after providing traders with the best development environment and the amplest opportunities, we developed a language named MQL4. By its features, it became the best language intended for programming trading strategies and custom indicators. Since it was released, automated trading has significantly grown in popularity, and the number of Expert Advisors’ writers has essentially increased.

Automated trading boom led us to the idea of organizing a global contest among Expert Advisors. An important feature of the contest had to be full transparency and availability of all materials, as well as absolute independency of EAs. Gradually, having considered these and some other issues, we concluded that we were able to organize such a contest.

Having considered all pros and cons, we took it up, so our first championship, the Automated Trading Championship 2006 took place from the 1st of October to the 25th of December 2006. 258 developers from all over the world participated in it, and three Winners shared the prize of totally 80 000 US dollars. That Championship aroused much interest in traders. Moreover, since it was absolutely open, the Championship allowed us to collect fids of very helpful information that could be used by everybody in his or her research and development. Considering high estimate made by traders and the identified need in such a contest, we decided to make it annual.

Helping traders in their hard work, we always did our best to provide them with as much information as possible. With this object in mind, we launched different websites and communities, published articles and communicated on forums. We also published the book named Forex: From Simple to Sophisticated intended for high readership of traders. We are working on the second book now that will be devoted to automated trading. It is planned to be released in electronic format and for free. We hope that the second book will be useful for traders, too, and help them to explore the market better.

Looking back through 7 years of our services, we understand very well that traders and brokers play the most important role in our company’s life. These were mostly your comments and suggestions that allowed us to create really functional and user-friendly software solutions. These are you who help us to become leaders on the market and who make our solutions the most popular ones in the entire world.

Many thanks to you all!