in my opinion trading bots are a fairy 
♂
some Saint graal money-printing software that for some reasons newbies think they could find or buy.
on another hand, the world of forex trading put a strong emphasis on strict, mechanically applied strategies. as if you’d have to be a human-bot.
isn’t that contradictory?
max, Jess, I don’t mind about your life.
I mind about the contradiction between the ridiculous faith in trading bot and the insistence of obedience to trading rules by traders.
do not hijack the thread
I am definitely for manual trading with compliance with indicators, etc.
I think it’s more of being emotionally detached trading forex rather than being a human bot. I believe trading is a series of educated guesses, logic based forecasting and a sprinkle of luck hahaha.
Hi,
I am not sure I understand all of your post, but the reason I returned to trading after a 4 year break is because I waited until I found a solution to my own predisposition to be unable to handle my own written Psychology Plan. It was only after working on contract to deliver an initial information system for robotic process automation last year that it occurred to me that Expert Advisors were the solution to my trading failures of the past. With a great deal of time, and interest, I have been spending some tens of hours per week for the past few months retracing my previous Trading knowledge knowing that I need to be able to programme those EAs myself to eliminate the Psychology damage from the equation. In short, I could not disagree with you more. 
@Mondeoman
I’ve always seen trading has being somehow an art, which require some instinct and feeling, rather than simply having to “finally find the perfect combination of indicator and rigid short/long signals”. because anyone finding this Saint grail combination, could simply write a money-printing bot, and get infinite passive income. which sounds like a fairy tale.
have you had long term regular success with EAs so far?
I remember reading someone’s comment, “Trading is an art that is working very hard at becoming a science but never seems to quite achieve it”.
Hi,
I have yet to finish my revised strategy and plan, and have not yet even embarked on any EA, RPA. I don’t even know how to backtest data automatically, so in that respect, I am a newbie. And I am in no hurry either. I re-opened a trading account last September and deposited funds, and haven’t touched it yet. If this were my first time around, I would be guilty of analysis paralysis. But I have proven to myself that I have the required patience this time around. Given that the financial commitment is currently less than 1% of our assets, and that I still have the day job(s), it is not surprising I have taken this long. Other stuff (life) gets in the way. My current (and probably future) approach to trading is more an inter-generational thing than anything else. Being over 60, this is a matter of readjusting asset allocations more than dreaming whether Forex trading can produce an income on which our future base costs rely. It’s a mind game for me. I know I will succeed. I just don’t know how well I will succeed. The Trading Plan is the final step in the asset re-allocation plan that may take 10 years to complete. I hope that makes sense. Not everyone looking at Trading as a potential future component of their lives needs to generate an income from it. The goal and objective is to do so, but to fail to plan is to plan to fail. I have already done that three times over in the past, and am not keen on repeating the same results. That would make me insane, in Einstein’s opinion.
I should also mention that the day job is a contract project manager (IT) from where I get my pedantic approach that all things must be managed with a strategy and a plan that achieve my goals and objectives. This being the sixth and final “five year plan period” of my life since I restarted from a net zero assets thirty years ago, it is the most important. Of the three future scenarios of “worst case”, target and stretch target, a complete failure of my Trading plan would mean that we will not achieve stretch target.
I think the distinction between trading as an art form and trading as a robot is false, neither will work if applied in absolute terms.
Trading needs a plan or else it is random shots in the dark. As prices can only go up or down from any point, it cannot be very hard to construct a plan to cope with either eventuality. OK, you might refine your plan by considering what if price go up quickly or slowly, or down quickly or slowly. But its still a plan and its still pretty simple.
how is a mechanical plan, set of rules, different from what a bot can do?
instinct is based on experience, and knowledge about how the market is most likely to react. this is not really random
There are lots of profitable strategies, but where is the profitable bot?
“Instinctive” reactions are learned by experiences with reality. These can be formulated into a plan. If they;re not formalised, how would you know if your instinctive reactions are different in 3 years to what they are today? And if instinctive reactions were purely instinctive, how could they be studied and improved?
Or maybe instinctive traders are just too lazy to draw up the rules of their strategy? Maybe they’re superstitious, and believe if they look too hard at what they’re doing, it won’t work any more…
if there is indeed profitable mechanical strategies, what restrain us to execute them thru a bot?
I’ve never tried a bot as in general no single one of them has a reputation for being hugely profitable.