EA’s Anyone?

I am not a big advocate of EA’s (unless you have coded your own trading strategy, but I am not referring to that now) which you can either buy from third-party vendors or download for free from various websites including right from your MT4 terminal. I don’t even want to go into pro’s and con’s with this thread, but simply point out one question you may want to ask yourself before giving any EA a trial:

[B][I]Why would anyone sell (or give you) a trading strategy which works?
[/I][/B]

Good thread mate. Hope to see more answers. If I have a such great strategy I won’t sell it.Why would I do it even for a higher bid ?

a guess is that their sales team targeting group is not the average retail trader; it is either the -very- newly introduced traders or big funds/institutions etc. where the same stuff is sold with a few modifications according to their clients wishes.

No fund/institution will buy an EA from a third party vendor. They spend their time creating their own ‘things’.

Yeah, Agree. They are facing a huge risk. So I can’t see they are going for such risky decision.

obviously + i don’t know if smth like that is really happening,

[B]yet[/B] i find it hard to think that when a new, well marketed EA catches Mr Smith’s (CEO/CFO of some fund/institution) eye, he is not allowed to check it out and even ask that 3rd party minor/major modifications and exclusivity of course.
otherwise he would not be too smart…therefore, facing limited period of time in such position.

Who do you think makes these EA. Its the marketing arm off your local broker looking to get every last penny out of you. Hate marketers they are scum IMHO.

I disagree. A well marketed EA is for the public and if a CEO/CFO of a fund or institution has to look at a third-party vendor who spend most their time marketing for a trading advantage he/she should have never held that position.

If you have looked at EAs for any period of time you will find that nearly all of them fail to work, some work in a particular market and some work in another type of market but no EA that i have seen works in all markets, so the upshot is that if you simply use an EA sooner or later you will go bust. How often have you said to yourself “i didn’t see the market doing that”? As EAs are all rules based they will fail in the end because the market will defy your rules

What an interesting philosophical question, LastBear.

On the one hand, you have the major funds/institutions who are regular (some may say, sole) users of high frequency trading, utilising EAs all the time. One has to suspect that they develop their own but there’s nothing to suggest that, if they see something they like, they shouldn’t go after it.

On the other hand, you have the retail traders (me and thee?) who are always looking for an ‘edge’ to help them towards profitability, be that an EA which works (is that an oxymoron?) or a shaft of light in their world of gloomy misunderstanding and/or benevolent ignorance.

Why someone would sell their EA is, of course, their way of gaining that ‘edge’. It may be making them money but selling it will make even more. Giving it away is probably more altruistic based on the idea that it isn’t going to affect them if someone else is successful or not but adds to their own feeling of well-being and ego - same reasons that many people give to charity.

Bottom line is, I would suggest, that on the basis that the vast majority who take/buy one of these is going to be in the realms of the predominantly losing retail traders it makes not one jot of difference how many EAs there are. What we do has no bearing on the market at all. If 10,000 of us all double or treble our accounts this year, this week or this month, will that have any adverse effect on HSBC or Goldman’s? I doubt it.

lets not forget if EAs were that good at making money the brokers would have stopped them. most brokers encourage EAs and provide help ad advice on building them. They wouldn’t be doing that if it cost them money

Automatic trading as opposed to discretionary is how almost all of the big players act. And even though they have millions of dollars and math phds, what they create and run is still just a setup of EAs, though many times more advanced than anything marketed to the retail crowd.

The conclusion though is that EAs do work, not most of them of course, but some who manage to figure it out can fairly easily create an EA that is profitable in a well chosen investment universe.

I don’t have an EA, but I talk about my trading method with anyone that will listen. Does my trading method work?

I’ve been on vacation most of this month and still managed to get these trades in.

I have an online journal people can read about everything I do. I make YouTube videos to try to help people learn. And I tweet out my trades as quickly as I can. All for free, and I bet I smoke any EA out there being touted to retail traders.

GIVE IT AWAY!. WE ARE HERE TO HELP OTHERS. iF NOT i THINK THOSE PEOPLE SHOULD LEAVE. THERE IS NO WAY YOUR HELPING ANOTHER TRADER WILL HURT OR DETRACT FROM THE MILLIONS YOU MAKE. IF YOU WERE NOT AWARE, THE FOREX DOES MORE VOLUME THAN ALL THE OTHER MARKETS COMBINED. 4+TRILLION PER DAY. SO, IF YOU HELP SOMEONE WITH A WORKABLE SYSTEM WHAT IS IT GOING TO DO? MAKE THEM AND YOU FEEL BETTER.
GREENINKPHD

Online journal full of ads… Does your method work? Who knows, that depends on your risk management doesn’t it… Successful manual scalpers are few and far between. Maybe you’re one, maybe you’re not

People who write in all capital letters are in my experience a special kind of people.

I am not a advocate in any form of EA’s. But as a possible answer to your question:
There are still those that believe in the almighty “get rich quick” scheme. There is also those who believe in getting rich off those who believe in the “get rich quick” schemes.

I’ve only heard bad things about them

I’m a newbie with a demo account of $250 and eight pairs to trade. I already went through a first demo account and could sure use a better system than what I’m doing (price action with a couple of moving averages to help).

In my opinion is that very very few EAs work in the long term, when the market is following the path its suppose to then yes a rules based EA can work but as we all know nothing is that simple and the market does not always follow the path we think it should and then its bye bye trading accont