The Truth About Expert Advisor
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). 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 is an ideal solution to overcomes a human trader weakness: inability to watch the market 24/5 without rest at all.
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. 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 geting 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. 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”. 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? The method is simple; just open a dummy account, place your EA there (you still have to spend some money on VPS though), and test it for at least a month, thus you can see if it is really profitable or not against live market movement. 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.
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 .