If you’re not familiar with the words “expert advisor”, you may have heard these: Forex Robot, Automated Forex Trading Software, or simply EA (short for Expert Advisor). Basically, they are all just different terms for one thing: an automated script that run under your MT4 trading platform to watch the market for potential trade, maintain positions, and place orders by itself without any trader interventions. 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. There are many version of them, some of them are programmed to alert you if there is trading opportunity arise (known as trading signals), the other can automated the whole process: watching the market, analyzing, adjusting stop loss, trailing stops, and take profit, and making entry and exit from the market 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 happens because more than half of the EAs in the market are mere trash that can only win against past data but keep getting loss trades against real market. 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. Basically, they are all having a set of rules to trade forex that allow them to achieve winning trades on regular basis and they follow it strictly.
I’m sure you’ve got the picture 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”. When the rules are made by an experienced trader who has use the same rules to make a living from trade forex, the EA will mirroring the trader and become a real “expert”; on the other hand, if the rules are made by some programmers whose aim is only to match the program to win in backtest, the EA become real “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 AvaFX review.
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 performed forex robot .