The old 'Does automated trading really work' queston

hi babypippers,
please dont hate me for asking this question that i know has been asked many times before. i was hoping to get a fresh discussion going.

“does auto trading/ EA’s really make consistant profit for people in a real world situation?”

the main arguments i have heard against are that 1) if an EA is good, more people use it and the opportunities are ‘used up’, as allegedly happened with megadroid and fapturbo. 2) computors arent as clever as people (but they may be in the future possibly) and that they cant calculate the ‘psycology’ of the market.

the first point makes sense in an arbitrage situation but perhaps not for a trend following or reversal system. unless ive totally misunderstood everything (quite posible) the more people that buy the trend at the same time, the stronger it will be.

point 2 about stupid computors. i think that computors are not very good at visual pattern recognition, or learning. but they are damn good at number crunching and following rules. joke alert: computors make very fast, very accurate mistakes.
you colud perhaps use your brain to do thinking about logical cause and effects and patterns and use computors to do the boring maths and produce objective signals based on your human brain rules.

Ide really like to hear from people with experience (sucess or lack thereof) of real (semi) automated trading with EA etc.

many many props to the babypips comunity. xxxx

bob131, I would like to applaud you for posing this question. I am so new to forex it is not funny. I have been looking into EA’s since I started studying and am dumbfounded as to the number of people that say EA’s are a bust. I can not wrap my head around why or how brain power mixed with a simple EA CAN NOT make money. I would really like to be convinced that it can or can not work once and for all so I can move on and take action.

My 2 cents - I would never let an EA run on it’s own and expect it to make money for me.

I will however use it for trailing stops - -or maybe even entries at somepoint - however - I want to know every in and out of it - so I will only ever develop my own.

My vote - use it in conjunction with your brain - I view it sort of as it’s watching the charts-so I don’t have to 24x5 - and if they do something - like touch a trendline - or create a certain candle pattern or what have you then simply send me a text alert - and I will decided from there.

I feel like you’re missing a possible answer.

There is no option : I’m only trading EA’s or signals and making money from them

hopefully the poll will get some attention from people with real world experience :)

thanks for your input PerchTird.