Should You Buy Forex Expert Advisors?

Hello, friends! The web is overflowing with offers to buy a "super-mega-profitable" forex expert advisor. Every day in our VK group, 50-100 sellers of "forex grails" get banned; instead of enjoying life on the profits from a magic robot, they spam social networks. So where is the truth? How do you find a magic advisor that will be profitable? Is it worth spending your money on the sweet promises of touts?

99.9% of the forex robots they try to sell you on the internet are complete trash. Yes, yes, that is right, you heard correctly. It is an industry of deception. Pretty pictures, promises of millions in profit for just 100$.... Oddly enough, trusting simpletons do not run out, and so the industry keeps doing its work.

Very often you can come across the following argument: "Why sell an advisor if it brings good profit?"

It seems obvious that there is no reason. However.... Let us suppose an advisor brings in 3-5% per month. That is a good result, seriously. The author of the robot has 10000$, opens an account and puts the robot on it. How much will he earn? 300-500$ per month. Again, not bad, but how much will the author of the expert advisor earn if he sells it, say, for 100$ per copy? By selling only 10 copies in a month, the developer will already earn 1000$. And that is without risking his own capital, which he may not even have.

And what if it is a martingale advisor? That is, one that can lose the deposit at any moment? Then the motive for selling it instead of using it on your own account is even more obvious.

There is also a category of "demo grails", that is, advisors that show profit on demo accounts, but not on real deposits... Naturally, it is more profitable to sell such programs, because you cannot withdraw demo money from the account)

So, we have found out that most advisors on sale are junk, but from time to time there are worthwhile specimens. How can you identify them?

So, how can you determine whether an advisor is worthy of attention?

1. Backtests

The most doubtful and unreliable part of assessing a bot's prospects. They can be easily faked. There have even been cases when scammers inserted a history-reading function into the robot so that in tests it showed perfect results, because it knew in advance where the price would go.

The only advice that can be given here is that the equity curve in the tests should be fairly smooth, and the tests should have 99% modeling quality.

2. Monitoring

Monitoring of a real account is an essential part of evaluating a trading bot. If there is no monitoring, feel free to close the page. It is also worth checking that it is monitoring of a real account and not a demo one.

Unfortunately, monitoring can also be faked. I wrote about checking the authenticity of monitoring, but even those checks can be tricked if someone really wants to.

3. Reviews

Naturally, there is no point in paying attention to reviews on the software sales page; they are written by student freelancers for a couple of dollars.

It is worth paying attention to discussions of advisors on forums. One more or less adequate one would be this resource, dedicated to discussing commercial robots. But even there users do not always have everything in order with their perception of reality)

Our forum has a section called Owls Wanted, where threads are posted about new advisors that do not yet exist in a "free" version. It can be used as a source of information.

So, you believe that the trading robot is worthy of attention and are going to buy it. But you should not forget about such a criterion as return on investment.

Let us suppose the advisor is sold for 200$ and shows an average return of 5% per month on the monitoring of a real account. Accordingly, to recoup the cost of the advisor within 3 months (this is the recommended period, given market variability and the fact that you still need to earn something beyond the cost of the bot), you need a deposit of at least 1350$. Can you afford such an account solely for trading this expert advisor? If yes, then you can buy the software. If not, it is worth considering other options.

So, what conclusions can we draw? You definitely should not fall for ads for miracle systems on the web. You may buy some advisor with your hard-earned money only if you have experience working with expert advisors, understand what you are doing, and your expected deposit will allow you to recoup the cost of the advisor.

In general, paid robots worthy of attention become free after some time and appear on the expanses of the internet. And there are quite a few interesting developments whose authors share them free of charge. Keep an eye on new robot reviews in the Forex Advisors section, as well as on our forum.

Best regards, Pavel Vlasov TradeLikeaPro.ru