How it All Came to Be... The Story of EA Reviewers

It feels like it has been decades when I look back a few years and see the start of what would become a daily-updated blog about automated trading systems and forex trading. Many things have passed during these two and a half years, reviewers have come and gone, experts have been tested and discarded and people have got their accounts funded and wiped. Today I want to write a post to honor all of those who have participated in this story of true expert advisor reviewing, many have found this endeavor to be too exhausting and time consuming while others have found the strength to continue with their tests and their quest for that holy grail people have been looking for since 2007. But how did this all began, how did we take the decision to start reviewer websites ? Why did so many quit and who actually remain ?

This whole journey in forex automated trading started for me in middle 2007 as I was living in the quiet and lovely region of Cumming Georgia with my girlfriend. I had already been trading the forex market for a few years (with some pauses, actually I had used mt3 before but didn't realize it had an auto trading feature) and I was certainly determined to make it work this time. One day, I had the "brilliant" idea of searching for the phrase "forex automated trading" and quickly some results popped up about metatrader, the forex-tsd forum and some very initial commercial EA websites which were more about some programmer making an EA and selling it rather than a mass marketed scam ( although this experts also didn't work).

I remember buying my first couple of experts, testing them on live accounts and feeling utterly disappointed. How could this people be so dishonest ? Why would they sell me something which would lose money so quickly and failed to show any of the results advertised ? This is when I started to look for reviewers and, to my surprise, the only true website I found which tried to review experts in an independent way belonged to a nice fellow from Singapore called Ckow Yong. I quickly contacted him and we engaged in an idea sharing relationship which lasts to this day.

However, as good as CK's approach was to EA reviewing and the great effort he was making; I didn't like several things about his site including his offering of affiliate links and the fact that he traded systems like black boxes without ever wondering if it was key to understand the logic behind them. This is the time when I decided to start this blog in which I first had a CK-like approach (without the affiliate links) and then I started to move beyond what he had done, analyzing and focusing on why all these commercial systems were not working and what could be done to make a system that worked. I consider that my website is the 2nd true unbiased review site and for this I think I am one of the "old guys" in the reviewers scene, not as known or as popular as others, but still, an old dog in this field of EA reviewing and automated trading :o).

Sadly, commercial systems took a toll on CK's patience (since nothing was working) something which prompted him to leave the expert advisor scene in search for some more reliable ways of making profit in trading. I think that CK came to the same conclusions as I did but we both took different approaches to solve the problem. He decided that experts were actually not the way to go, while I decided that making long term profitable experts should be a real possibility since all my reading and analysis had taught me that the market was certainly inefficient to some extent.

Then the "true scam age" of automated trading started with the introduction of FAP turbo and about 10 new different expert advisors every month. I can tell you that this period trialed my patience but at this time I was already a lot more knowledgeable and I was able to see right through the sales pages to give my true insights about the expert advisors I was reviewing. At this time Donna Forex started to come into the picture. She took an opportunity given by the FAP turbo expert advisor in which many people wanted to use it but they didn't know how to work with it (which settings to use, how to evaluate them, etc), since CK wasn't in the scene anymore and I wasn't interested in this system, Donna came in to fill this gap and help people use this commercial system. After this I believe that Donna has filled the space left by CK in the sense that her approach is quite similar, newsletters, affiliate links, an effort to remain unbiased, etc.

Then we had some other reviewers like DuyDuy (duyduyfx.blogspot.com) who did not like to write English prose very much but did want to test expert advisors. His blog, which is still online to date, shows performance charts every now and then of the different systems evaluated by him. His approach is the simplest and utterly the most dangerous and the most transparent, he simply shows trading system results, and you decide what is worth using and what is not. The problem being mainly that this encourages the use experts which show short term profitable results which are bound to wipe accounts in the long term, something which I have talked about in a few previous posts.

In 2009 we saw the appearance of some new guys to the scene, with Casey from bestforexea.com being the most prominent. His approach to automated trading reminds me clearly of my early days with CK and reading the forex-tsd forum. Casey has always been focused on scalpers and Martingale systems and I believe that he is what I consider the questing knight of the EA reviewing community, he is attempting to find something which we have all found from experience and analysis doesn't exist but I believe that he is now starting to realize these things himself and probably we will see some interesting evolution from his part this year. Casey also did some very important contributions to the EA scene by revealing how many expert advisors were simply copy-cats of other trading systems found freely on forums.

Almost three years have passed now and I feel that we have all done our part to enrich the automated trading community with whatever approach we think is best. Donna continues to test commercial expert advisors as Duyduy and Casey while I have decided to go into a different direction in which knowledge and understanding are primordial for success. I think that they will all realize in time that commercial trading systems are not the answer (mainly because one thing is to develop an EA to sell and another to develop an EA to trade) and they will take whatever path they think is best to sort this out. It is exciting to think about the future and about where we will all be in a few years. Definitely I hope that we will all still be active and working in our own ways to bring people a true solution to long term profitability in forex automated trading.

There are also some new guys, like Chris (fx-mon.blogspot.com) . I encourage them to go on and build their own knowledge regarding automated trading systems and how to use them to be profitable. Definitely it is a long and hard journey but also a rewarding one altogether. To all reviewers and traders working on automated trading, I wish you the best luck, hopefully we will all still be working on our websites and content in ten years :o)

If you would like to learn more about what I have learned in automated trading and how you too can build and design profitable automated trading systems based on sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !