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). They're all refer to the same thing: an automated script used by your trading platform (mostly MT4) to watch the market, analyze market data, manage positions, and place orders automatically without human interventions. Theoretically, this is 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, putting stop-loss, trailing stops, and take profit orders. Of course, they can make entry and exit from the market by themselves too.
If you have done manual trading for a while and have your share of profits, I know that it sounds too good to be true. Offering cheap software that can outsmart you in trade forex does sound like what a scammer would 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 turned out that most of these EAs are not "expert" at all since all that they can do is get winning trades in back-testing (test them against past market data), not in real live trading. 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 have been trading for a while you must have 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 conditions. Nevertheless, all of them are following a set of rules while trading and they gain steady profits by follow it with strict discipline.
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; 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 are 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 are set by some idiots who can only modify its program to match past data, the EA become "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.
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 make even greater profits from the forex market.
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