Thursday, November 20, 2008

A Proven Profitable Forex Expert Advisor

Ok, this is what all of you have always been looking for and probably the reason why you entered my website. You are looking for a proven, profitable expert advisor that you can trust and trade in your live account with the most minimal risk of large equity draw downs.

With all due respect : You are delusional.

Let's start with the facts. What do you mean by proven ? Someone has made money with it ? Someone has been making money with it for an x amount of time ? Many have made money ? It has made money on different brokers ? As you can see, the answer to this question is very difficult by itself. I will now make something clear to you which you may have already suspected and which may seem a little bit hard to read : There is no such thing as a proven system in the forex market and there is no such thing as a low risk expert advisor.

Yes, that's right. There is no such thing. This happens by definition, because the forex market is dynamic, ever changing and unpredictable in nature. Hence, it is what you would call a high risk market. It is high risk because (you guessed right) the risk of losing capital is very high ! And this cannot be avoided by using an automated trading system. There is no such thing as a low risk opportunity in a high risk market. If you expect to make money consistently, for years, in the forex market, using automated systems, without high risk, please choose another investment vehicle. Perhaps something less risky, like T bonds, would better fit your risk profile.

Does this mean that evaluating expert advisors is meaningless ? No. By testing expert advisors in live and demo accounts we can get an idea of how they work, under what circumstances they work, what consistent profit and expected draw downs we might get. This is because even though the forex market is unpredictable, it can be statistically studied. We cannot tell what will exactly happen, but we can estimate the probabilities and this is one of the things that tells a profitable trader apart from a failing one.

Let's say for example that certain automated trading system gets a 4% profit from 2005 to 2008 in live testing. We can look at overall market conditions and the past 60 years of market history and tell if they are likely to change, to what and what the probability of working would be if said conditions would change. Was the market in an uptrend ? Downtrend ? going sideways ? What was the volatility ? In essence, the longer an ea works, the more robust it it, that is, the more change in market conditions it can withstand. However, if market conditions were to change to something that did not happen for the last x years the ea was tested on, then it can fail.

This is were that disclaimer we have all read comes into play "past perfomance does NOT guarantee future results". Read it about a hundred times.

What is our defense against this ? Have more than one expert advisor, have a portfolio and have them on separate accounts, if all of them have been tested and are robust, when one fails, the most probable thing is that the other will not and vice versa. You need to diversify in automated trading because the systems have limited visibility, they cannot overcome big changes in market conditions due to their rather inflexible nature. Will every tested ea ever programmed have a period in which it will wipe an account ? The answer is, probably yes.

If you would be interested in learning a little bit more about my opinions, criteria and what expert advisors I have tested and consider worth trading please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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