If “expert advisor” sounds strange in your ear, you may have stumbled upon more “common” terms: automated trading software, forex robot, or simply EA (short for Expert Advisor). 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. On paper, this is very convenience since it can replace human trader to watch the market 24/5 so there is no potential profits that will be missed.
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 forex software – the trading robot .
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. Offering cheap software that can outsmart you in trading forex is sounds like most of scammer will do anyway. 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 facts and it still happening now.
“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.
Don’t let your prejudice cloud your judgment; although most of the current expert advisors at the market are merely scams, there are a handful that really work and you can use them to achieve even greater profits from the forex market. Check and test the top recommended forex robot at best forex robot .
