If you never heard about “expert advisor”, probably you’ve come across these terms: forex robot, automated Forex Trading software, or maybe just EA. All of them are literally the same thing: an automated software that utilize your trading platform (usually a MetaTrader platform) to analyze the market for potential profit opportunity, manage opened positions, and execute orders automatically without human operator. Theoretically, this can be very useful since no human trader can bear to watch the 24/5 forex market continuously.
Most expert advisor are written in MQL-4 programming language and designed to run under MetaTrader 4 trading platform. These advisors can help you in two different ways: send you info when a profit opportunity occur at the market (AKA trading signal) or taking over all your job as a trader by automatically analyzing, executing orders, putting stop loss and take profits order, and managing open positions by itself. Read more about the benefits of using the second version at automated trading software .
If you’ve been a fan of manual trading for a while and have got your share of profits, I know that it sounds too good to be true. Selling low price program that can do better in trading forex than you does sounds a little fishy. Well, there is truth in that way of thinking; over the years, there are many investors lose their money because they trusted their fund to be managed by an EA. It turn out that most of these EAs are not “expert” at all since all that they can do is get winning trades in backtesting (testing them against past market data), not in real live trading. This is the hard truth behind many forex robot in the market and up until this date, many scam programmer still creating similar robots.
“I knew it” is probably what you think now, but there’s another side of the coin that you must know too. It is purely logical thinking and not rocket science at all, so bear with me for another 2 minutes.
If you’ve been trading for a while you must’ve known that every successful trader have their own trading system that can works without fail in their area of expertise; maybe swing trade strategy on USD-JPY currency pair, maybe long term 3-7 days strategy on GBP-USD, maybe intraday scalping method on EUR-USD, or maybe they have a few set of strategies for different market condition. Nevertheless, all of them following a set of rules while trading and they gain steady profits by follow it with strict discipline.
You should’ve understand the basic concept by now. All the EAs are just a bunch of codes that executing what they’ve programmed for; to be exact, they’re merely executing the rules behind them, these rules are what make them truly “expert” or truly “trash”. If the rules (AKA the trading system) behind them is set by a real professional trader who uses the same set of rules to generate profit in live trading, the EA become true “expert”, but if the rules is set by some idiots who can only modify its program to match past data, the EA become “trash”.
How to differentiate them? A simple yet effective way to test it is run your EA on a practice account for minimum 4-5 weeks (you will need to pay a VPS service); from the result you can judge its performance against the volatility of real market. Most of them are “forced” to offer 60 days 100% money back guarantee due to the merchant rule, so you’re safe to test it during that period. You can get $100,000 MT4 dummy account at AvaFX; read more about them at a review of AvaFX.
Do not let those scammers make you lose potential profits from forex trading; it is true that more than half of the current EA at the market today are trash, but a few of them are really backed up by a real trading system that qualified to manage and grow your fund. Check and test the top recommended forex robot at best forex robot .
