People just don’t seem to understand that the time to try to automate your trading with an EA is “after” you can trade successfully (i.e steadily, profitably and safely) not “before”, or “as a way of trying to”!!
I suppose aspiring traders get the trading robots they deserve, really, more or less: as long as people are naïve enough to spend money on them, there won’t be any shortage of people willing to promote and market them.
People typically lose money through forex-trading when they look for short-cuts, wanting to avoid the practice, education, patience and discipline that are actually necessary to turn it into a profitable activity.
In theory there could be successful EA’s, but the practical reality is that if one ever were, it would never be marketed as an affordable EA to the general public. There are valid and good reasons for this, but many people are a bit too naïve to think them through, and some are opinionated enough not even to be willing to listen to them, easy though they are to understand.
Big trading institutions employ highly-paid experts to assess such software, so anyone who had one that actually worked, safely and robustly, would make a fortunes from it by that route, without needing to advertise it online as an EA. Example: in the mid-1990’s Crédit Suisse leased a trading robot from the US software engineers, mathematicians, market analysts and traders who had created it, for $100,000 per month basic, plus an ongoing profit-share - and other, similar institutions have made other, similar arrangements, since then, too. These things are common enough - and you don’t need to be Einstein or Hawking to understand that if they actually work, they’re obviously not being sold off on the MQL5 market for a few hundred dollars per copy!!