When automated trading began it's furor a few years ago, everybody was ecstatic at the possibility of automating their trading strategies and becoming successful in automated trading. However, we began to learn that turning profitable manual strategies into robots is not as easy as it sounds and that introducing a computational variable into the matter revealed problems we didn't use to have.
Now the matter became a little bit more complicated when people realized that automated trading strategies could be packaged and sold as "get rich" schemes for people who wanted to be profitable traders but lacked the skills to do so manually. Anyway, some people out there decided to give out their trading strategies for free and this is when the world of free expert advisors began.
Since the beginning it was completely clear that most free expert advisors lacked quality and even coherence. One after one, programmers started to create martingale beasts, hedge experts, grid systems, etc. It was clear that free trading systems, for the most part, where just the dreams of programmer/traders who most of the time were not profitable manual traders, manifested in a piece of code. Now don't think that commercial expert advisors where any better ! Nobody had had significant experience with automated trading in mt4 and many commercial expert advisor sellers were just free expert advisor makers who decided their ideas could be marketed. Then there were also people who robbed free expert advisor ideas that seemed good and made websites and auctions on ebay to sell them.
Things became even worse when someone had the great idea of introducing referrals into forex products. If you search the web, 99% of all expert advisor reviewer web pages are tied to the expert advisors they review by commissions. I have always believed that commissions automatically bias the reviewer towards making the product more interesting in order to sell it (I know it would bias me). This of course, is not a good thing for free expert advisors since there is no insentive whatsoever to review experts who offer no referal bonuses.
So we have several factors that have affected the way in which free expert advisors are perceived. First, there is no incentive for reviewers who want commisions (which are sadly most) and second, good free expert advisors are terribly hard to locate. It demands experience and a certain know how of what can and cannot be profitable in automated trading in order to filter the 99.9% of experts that simply will never work and work with those that have an opportunity to do so.
Since I have no referal interests whatsoever, I decided to continuously search, test and review free expert advisors, with some of them having more than a year of forward testing (God's Gift) I am now almost sure that quality, profitable free expert advisors can be found out there and that they can as well match the quality of commercial experts. Now if you are interested in looking at the testing results of this experts or learning more about the free and commercial experts I have reviewed 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 !
Now the matter became a little bit more complicated when people realized that automated trading strategies could be packaged and sold as "get rich" schemes for people who wanted to be profitable traders but lacked the skills to do so manually. Anyway, some people out there decided to give out their trading strategies for free and this is when the world of free expert advisors began.
Since the beginning it was completely clear that most free expert advisors lacked quality and even coherence. One after one, programmers started to create martingale beasts, hedge experts, grid systems, etc. It was clear that free trading systems, for the most part, where just the dreams of programmer/traders who most of the time were not profitable manual traders, manifested in a piece of code. Now don't think that commercial expert advisors where any better ! Nobody had had significant experience with automated trading in mt4 and many commercial expert advisor sellers were just free expert advisor makers who decided their ideas could be marketed. Then there were also people who robbed free expert advisor ideas that seemed good and made websites and auctions on ebay to sell them.
Things became even worse when someone had the great idea of introducing referrals into forex products. If you search the web, 99% of all expert advisor reviewer web pages are tied to the expert advisors they review by commissions. I have always believed that commissions automatically bias the reviewer towards making the product more interesting in order to sell it (I know it would bias me). This of course, is not a good thing for free expert advisors since there is no insentive whatsoever to review experts who offer no referal bonuses.
So we have several factors that have affected the way in which free expert advisors are perceived. First, there is no incentive for reviewers who want commisions (which are sadly most) and second, good free expert advisors are terribly hard to locate. It demands experience and a certain know how of what can and cannot be profitable in automated trading in order to filter the 99.9% of experts that simply will never work and work with those that have an opportunity to do so.
Since I have no referal interests whatsoever, I decided to continuously search, test and review free expert advisors, with some of them having more than a year of forward testing (God's Gift) I am now almost sure that quality, profitable free expert advisors can be found out there and that they can as well match the quality of commercial experts. Now if you are interested in looking at the testing results of this experts or learning more about the free and commercial experts I have reviewed 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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1 comment:
I would like to add that there are free sites that forward test free EA's. PipCop.com is my current favorite. They have only been active since Oct 08, but they have been busy. Their approach is, 90 days on a demo account, if they can pass that profitably then they are evaluated for a live account. Very few have made it to live accounts, and fewer have survived for long once there. They also test commercial EA's, but are limited in this by the costs. This is a great site and I'm sure they would appreciate your input on useful EA's for future testing.
Thanks, Ken Long
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