How do you know what EA to trust?

I’ve seen enough advertisements about automated bots (Megadroid, FapTurbo, Pips Chaos, and now AutoFX) and the one thing I see that they all have in common is this: “we promise to make you a millionaire.” (Or double/triple/quadruple your account, whatever.) My two main questions is this:

  1. How are they able to get away with making completely groundless lies? I heard from a friend that if what they say is 70-95% true they’re not making false claims, but I doubt anyone has actually multiplied their accounts. If they have at least I haven’t heard about it anywhere on the net.

  2. If all their “unproven facts/data” is fabricated, how do you know what EA to trust?

I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts, thanks guys.

A few thoughts

  1. Trust none of them. Learn to code and learn to trade. Then code up and test your own system. There are plenty of well-publicized systems out there (eg parabolic sar or macd based systems). You can then know that your system
  • has a strong logic (known to you)
  • backtests well
  • forward tests well
  1. When you use a public robot, make sure you calibrate it to your own broker. Develop a calibration logic (timeframe, periodicity) which is consistent with the logic of the strategy. For example, a breakout strategy might work well in a ranging market but be subject to fakeout in the context of a trend. Same for a scalper.

I doubt the best known robots are fake (they get fame from referrals which in part comes from happy customers), but they’re also unlikely to be your ticket to the moon. Certainly they can’t be that out of the box.

Where there is demand, somebody will step in to fulfill it. These robot vendors are reaching out to the people who have the belief that there is some near miraculous way to make money with little effort or skill on their behalf. In many ways they remind me of the baldness cures you used to see advertised. Again they were trying to cater to people who had the belief that there must be some hope for them.

By the way, it seems that I don’t see as many ads for baldness cures as I used to. I wonder, perhaps they are trying to sell Forex robots now.:18:

For those who are interested, here’s an example of how a robot can perform differently with the standard ‘out of the box’ settings vs if one takes time to understand the strategy and calibrate the tool

First the standard settings, run from 1999 January to today:-


And here are the settings we have calibrated for the same strategy (run by the same robot):-


Notice the calibrated settings, which incidentally have been calibrated on 2010-2011 (the rest is ‘out of sample’) produce twice the profit.

Interestingly your experience would be even more dramatically different in 2010/2011:-

Standard settings [Jan 1 2009-present]


Calibrated settings [Jan 1 2009-present]


You can see that the results when you calibrate the robot are dramatically different from when you ‘set and forget’.

The premise to this question is bogus.

An Expert Advisor CAN ONLY BE EVALUATED as to the degree it FAITHFULLY REPRESENTS A MANUAL TRADING STRATEGY.

If you do not know the strategy that has been coded don’t even think about the EA (which u will need the original code and understanding of original strategy to evaluate) instead u need to learn about the authors strategy itself and evaluate that.

Sure an EA can blow up if badly written and many do, on partial fills, spikes, broken connections, 5 digit accounts, ECN brokers, micro vs mini accounts, Daylight Time Saving changes, US vs EU vs ASIA timezones, ranging vs trending markets, many little things. Many blow on fixed targets waiting on X pips while market visits X-5 pips then riding a retrace all the way to STOP LOSS. Yes lots of rotten programming out there. Potentially the issue where a good EA for a while suddenly goes bad.

But the bigger issue I’m seeing out there is the strategy. That’s where most high profile EA failures lie. Or put another way, if the code replicates the manual strategy to the letter, but for hardware failure the EA loses exactly where the original manual strategy would lose which is then down to the strategy not the EA which is just a dumb robot.

BACK STRATEGIES NOT ROBOTS!

If u do not know what strategy is in that robot then you deserve everything you get.

And if you enter the complex world of trading to shirk on the hard work and jump on the backs of others, get out now before you get your feelings hurt. This thing is NOT A GAME. If your not in trading to learn how to do it and develop your own system, give your money to a professional investment manager or better yet go and start a proper business.

A solid EA for sale at even $1000 is just an earner for the author. A good EA with capital will do that in one week. And a good EA would be shown to hedge funds and investment managers not to folks desperate to pay what little they have to make a fast one.

T H I N K

“Fxstreet - Expert Advisors MT4 (EAs) Love Them or Hate Them”

Fxstreet - Expert Advisors MT4 (EAs) Love Them or Hate Them - YouTube

People LOVE to hear lies and always search for someone to tell them lies in a beautiful way. Forex is all about this concept.

If some expert is really able to make millions, it will not be for sale. It will be used to make money for it’s developer. Everyone knows that, but prefer to forget it, because it’s not interesting.

heres what it boils down too these Auto Forex bot makers/owners make bots that make safe money where they know there gonna make money weather to double your account or triple it there goals are to make a safe robot to make your, lets say 10k account into a 20k account in a span of a year… i know a few guys who program these bots for a living they have robots that make a 10k account into a 100k account in a year but as a business point of view if you tell anyone you’ll make there 10k account into 100k account they’ll run away from you …unfortunately a lot of scams are out there trying to make a quick buck here and there so no one in the right mind would think about trusting these guys…my tip is to just try to see which one is legit and not a scam make sure they write up a contract or sign one with them check to see if there helpful and offer good customer service. Yes the safe way would be to make one yourself but not too many people have the time or skills to know how to program a robot to make a safe and effective trades