Best Expert Advisors: Reviews
The best expert advisors can help you to make a lot of money with forex trading, while a bad EA can simply be a drain on your cash. So how do you tell them apart? Most people do this by looking at reviews.
However, online reviews can be a mixed blessing when it comes to something as important as an expert advisor. In case you do not know, an EA is a forex robot or automated currency trading system that runs on the popular platform known as Metatrader 4. Basically, you hook up the robot to your broker’s software platform, set it to trade for you at the position size etc that you want, and go enjoy your day.
The problem of course comes if things go against you and it starts to lose your money instead of making it. This is always a danger with forex systems and even more when they are trading on autopilot so you may not be aware of what is happening. For that reason it is very important to run the EA on a demo account first until you have absolutely everything clear.
Reviews can certainly help you to narrow down your search when you are looking for a forex robot that will save you tons of time analyzing the market and placing your trades. However, there are two possible problems with reviews. One is that some reviews that you will find online are simply copied from the sales page for the EA itself and the person might not have used the robot at all. In this case you will usually see a very positive review with no indication of the possible downside. On the other hand a review from somebody who has actually used the software themselves can be very valuable because it will often give you hints and tips about how to get the most from it.
The other thing that you may come across is a strongly negative review from somebody who could not make the EA work for them. There may be all kinds of reasons for this which are not the fault of the EA itself. Often, either the person could not figure out how to set it up and became frustrated with it, or they set their risk too high. A common recommendation for risk is 2% per trade. The laws of statistics mean that setting your risk too high will always lead to a busted bank sooner or later, but people who do not realize this will often blame the system that they were using. This can lead to some very vitriolic comments and forum posts and of course it is never recognized that it is the fault of the trader. It must be the system’s fault!
What you should be looking for when you search through reviews for the best expert advisors is a general consensus, a balance of views. Rather than simply going by a star system or whether the person liked the EA, check for specific points such as these:
- Is it easy to set up, and how much does that matter to you?
- Is it suitable for somebody at your level? Is it aimed at beginners or experienced traders? Do you need to be taking a certain position size or using a particular broker to use this system?
- Does it suit your trading style in terms of the amount of risk (stop loss settings) and number of trades?
You may need to read between the lines a little bit to work out some of these points. For example, most EAs will claim to work for people at all levels, but a system that only makes a couple of trades a week is not going to make you much money on a micro trading account unless you take huge risks, so that’s why the number of trades can be important. However, many people who buy a new forex robot are also trading using other methods and then it does not matter so much if a robot only trades a couple of times a week.
So do check out reviews when you are looking for the best expert advisors, but follow your own agenda when it comes to how seriously you take them.
