Can You Trust Expert Advisors To Do Your Trading?
To trust or not to trust is the question.
You have to ask yourself this question, can you trust Expert Advisors to do your trading for you?
If you don’t know what is an expert advisor or trading robot, please check out this article about what is a Forex expert advisor.
I am an engineer by training and believe we should make use of technology and automation of some process to increase productivity and free yourself from some manual task that can be automated thus allocating more time for other tasks.
Understanding the Expert Advisor
Having said that, I’m a fan of automated trading with EAs (Expert Advisors) but not all EAs can be trusted before rigorous testing have been carried out and also a proper understanding of the strategy it’s programmed to trade and it’s algorithm.
Of course that may not be possible with some commercially purchased EA where you don’t have the trading algorithm and/or source code and even if you do and you don’t understand the code, it will still come to nothing.
Regardless of how automated your process can be, it still needs the human touch to turn it on/off and set the operating parameters and such. Leaving a robot on its own is not safe and will still need monitoring from time to time. Letting an EA run without monitoring can end up with empty account (EA).
No matter how prepared it is for all kinds of market condition as some claimed, there are always exception. There are times when certain market conditions that a robot cannot see or sense and will need human intervention to correct it.
Some will show you their expert advisor proven track record or back-testing with high accuracy for the past months or years, it doesn’t matter if the back-testing is done on live trading account or demo account.
I would like to point out that whatever the expert advisor had traded over the past minute, hour, days, weeks, months or years is still history once time has past.
And always remember past performance is not an indication of future results (I am sure you have seen many similar statements everywhere else). The Forex market is dynamic and volatile and unexpected things always happen from time to time. Some EA may work well in certain market condition but may not perform in all market condition.
So if you ask me, can you trust Expert Advisors to do your trading?
You have to monitor from time to time and may need to make make some decision along the way if it should be left on its own or to shut it down.
I have done a fair bit of testing of EAs and also know a bit of coding and my take is, I have yet to come across a full auto Forex expert advisor that can be trusted to run without monitoring and some human intervention.
Do your homework and understand what are the risks involved in using that EA. There are times when it’s better to shut your expert advisor down.
It can erase your account and I have personally seen it happened before to other people accounts.
So be warned! And always expect the unexpected.
In my opinion, a semi-auto expert advisor to help you place your order when the trading conditions are right would be a better option. But using a semi-auto Forex expert advisor means you have to be in front of your terminal to activate it and your emotions will come into play too when it’s time to pull the trigger.
Good luck and safe trade.
