Forex robots or Expert Advisors (EAs) for MT4 appear to be a dream come true for many people, as we can see from various chatrooms and comment sections. Automated trading has emerged as a perfect solution for anyone who finds manual trading to be too hard or resents the process of learning about the Forex market. Forex enthusiasts seem to love trading robots because they can work 24/7, they are unaffected by emotions, and they are available on the MetaTrader platforming many shapes and prices. The number of forex trading robots seems to be doubling each day, forex is more and more driven by automated solutions and increasingly intelligent AI.
If you just care about the gains and rate robots based on their net gain performance during a month or a year, you could be shocked that the best performing robot suddenly lost a big part of your account one day. Consequently, this leads us to how do we interpret the specs and presented the performance of an automated solution. MetaTrader 4 and 5 platforms have a testing module that could give us some clue if the robot is functioning well on a specific asset, time, or market conditions. The industry and the demand grew so much you now have so many websites selling EAs and investment companies that take deposits for their AI to trade with. Not to mention scalping strategies are mostly automated since they can execute much faster than a human would. The guide of how to find the best robot is likely to be obsolete in one year given the pace EAs are produced. What’s more, the robot could simply stop being “the best” once the market conditions change. So we are going to give you a few evergreen universal pointers for your quest.
The internet is full of marketing bloated false websites that attach to anything popular. Automated trading is very popular, everybody would like to earn money without knowledge about trading and almost no effort. When it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Now you have really to dig the internet search results to find something about robots without a bias of sponsorships, industry pitching, and overblown robot performance (fake). When you look at the top-ranking lists you will not find the same robots, and even top-ranked robots will not be the best according to reviews sites. Then it gets even fuzzier when you want to find a specific robot type. There are a few starting web portals you may look at first to have an overview of the EA market.
First, go to Forex Peace Army and read some reviews. The reviews on this site are not made by sponsors, but by real users, most of the time. You will also see some red flags and warning about a particular robot seller, scams also if you want to see how people got scammed, it is educational. Focus on robots with a good number of reviews, having a 5-star rating does have any weight if it is based on 2 reviews. When you read the reviews, try to figure out if they have enough useful information about the product. Something like “great robot!” does not mean a lot to anyone. Check the FPA forum if something grabbed your attention on the internet. For example, Forex Fury is a very praised robot by rank websites, but it is not as great according to users. Of course, robot users are not always good representatives of its quality, so take everything they say with a healthy dose of suspicion.
Explore how the robot selling portal looks like, who is the author, what is the strategy behind. Check for any flashy content, extremely good performance charts, percentages, and ambiguous claims or explanations about the robot. Any of the mentioned is a bad sign, especially when no trial is offered. Interestingly, demos are not commonly offered. You will notice when the portal is just full of pitching lines, it is wise to stay clear of those.
Before all, understand where the robot is applicable, its settings, how to set up, and if all this is in line with your lifestyle. It is not comfortable to fund a robot that is overtrading or has a Stop Loss level too far. Most of the time robots will require a sustainable connection with the market 24/7 so you will need a VPS service. Assess how all the costs combine to your preference and how much can it hopefully earn to make everything worthwhile. Some robots are based on subscriptions or work only in very calm market conditions when you are unavailable to put it to run. Therefore, you need to do a lot of o research about a robot of preference, including the performance elements.
Gains are not important, it is how they are achieved. If you see the robot is allowing for too big of an account drawdown (%) at any given moment, know its risk profile is not optimal. Some robots are just made for high-risk gains and are not meant to be used all the time since they will fail at one moment and bust the account. Robots with risky strategies are sometimes used with small deposits but on multiple leveraged accounts, one that endures a month might have enough gains to cover all the costs. People who want steady income will search for other strategies designed no to risk too much, single-digit gains per month without overtrading, martingale, and cost averaging when things go sour. Such robots/strategies are developed by experienced traders, able to be manually exercised with the right tools.
If you use the MetaTrader platform, then you probably know about the EA market. Here you can find so many robots, some of them are free. The best trading robot can be free and still make your profits. Some of the very promising robots are not even listed on any website except on the MQL market. Robot authors usually describe the robot strategy and performance charts to the best ability, yet some free robots do not serve really to provide good results and may just be demo versions of the paid variants. When you read the technical specifics presented, know they are not accurate. The high winning rate of some robots could reveal the strategy is based on many short trades with high-risk tolerance hence the winning rate is high. Lossing trades are typically extreme with these, even one is enough to leave you empty-handed.
Consider robots that are constantly updated. It is hard to devise a strategy adaptive to market conditions. Robots are rigid, simply there are not enough code statements to cope with the ever-surprising forex market. Because of this authors need to update their robots meaning you will inevitably see losses once the conditions are not “right” for your robot. Adaptive strategies are not that uncommon, the market conditions could be recognized by some tools for volatility, such as $EVZ, ATR, Choppiness Index, and similar. Also by comparing past data with the specific events that could drive the market bullish or bearish, for example. Automating strategies is very hard work and requires a lot of testing. The price for complex adaptive strategies robots is high, mostly over $1000, still, it is a small price to pay for something that generates consistent profits.
Finding the best robot requires a lot of work and luck. The search part is already time-consuming and unfortunately, the time invested in the research might not bear fruits. The promising robot might perform well and then simply stop. There is a lot of factors that could turn the odds quickly the robot just can’t compensate for. The answer to this bread question is unsatisfying – the best robot is the one who gives you at least some profit.
