Thursday, April 11, 2013

Forex Expert Advisor Trading


Automated trading is fast growing in popularity as an alternative to trading manually. This blog is to educate readers about what is an Expert Advisor, who can benefit for automated trading and even how to create your own forex  EA.

What is an Expert Advisor (EA)?

An Expert Advisor, that is also known as a Robot or EA. The logic behind automated trading is to allow software that is pre-programmed with a specific trading strategy to trade on a live forex account automatically for the owner/user. This allows the forex trader the freedom to trade the forex markets  24 hours a day without manually monitoring the markets for trading opportunities. The EA (Expert Advisor) takes hours care of all forex trading operations.

There are many forex expert advisors available on the market that are either sold independently, used via an Introducer or developed personally with a dedicated trading strategy. One common factor is that these automated tools (MT4 EAs) are developed specifically for use on the popular MT4 platform.

Who can Trade Forex with an EA?

Expert Advisors can be used by traders of all levels, from beginners to professionals, in fact many institutional forex organisations use auto trading systems to manage forex accounts. No matter the level of experience, an Expert Advisor can give a trader a massive trading advantage by allowing them to trade multiple markets and under different conditions. Each system is designed to fully manage trading opportunities and all trading operations including executing orders, using stop loss and take profit levels and adjusting pending orders and trailing stops.

There are many EAs available that operate using different settings, however, one common fact in all systems are the fact that each one operates using a predefined trading strategy and consistently evaluates all trading parameters at the same time. They operate much more efficiently than any human as all this data is processed instantly without any emotions that can cause a human to change or tweak the strategy.

If you are considering buying an Expert Advisor, or trading via an IB/EA Developer, then make sure that you first study the performance, operate tests and make sure that there is an open communication with the developer. Finally, you must fully understand how it works, and variables needed for successful forex trading and the expected results prior to trading.

How to Programme Your Automated Trading System (Expert Advisor)

Any profitable forex trading strategy can be programmed to an Exert Advisor using the MetaTrader 4 programming language MQL4 and can be released and tested on the internal MT4 strategy tester prior to live trading.

The MetaTrader 4 platform is the most popular forex trading platform due to its ability and flexibility to host any automated forex trading system. There are four critical tools needed to achieve your goal of developing your very own EA:
  • MetaTrader 4 Terminal - where automated trading programmes are managed and executed.
  • MetaQuotes Language 4 (MQL4) - the programming language for implementing trading strategies.
  • MetaEditor - editor and compiler of Expert Advisors.
  • Strategy Tester – an environment to test and optimise your Expert Advisors.

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