There are a multitude of places to find trading robots. Not only is there the MetaTrader terminal, but there’s the mql4 page, as well as the mql5 page online. These are the “official” marketplaces, but keep in mind that these expert advisors are not written by anybody special. Quite frankly, the gist traders around the world that have the ability to code. Being a good programmer doesn’t necessarily make you a good trader. As I record this, there are over 240 pages of robots that you can choose from, varying drastically and cost. Ratings of course are all over the place as well, as some will have performed better than others at certain points in the market. But that’s the biggest problem, most algorithms can only perform in the market conditions that they are optimize for. Because of this, most automated traders will use several different strategies. Of interest is that some of the larger firms in the United States are now starting to push robots, including Ally. They are known more for retirement accounts, but they are starting to offer currencies as well, and have an entire section devoted to robots. There are also firms around the world that specialize in automated trading, such as the Forex broker RoboForex in Singapore, where automated trading seems to be a bit more popular. Quite frankly, one of the things that you should keep in mind is that large banks such as Goldman Sachs spend millions of dollars on algorithms. It is very unlikely that you are going to find one for $50 that can match that type of performance. Remember, they are trading with large and real size, meaning that it is actually crucial that their algorithms make money. While many of these robots can make money from time to time, in the end it is essentially putting your finances in the hands of someone else that you don’t even know. If you are going to do that, you will probably be better off trying to find a financial fiduciary it to trade your money for you. If you do choose to go the automated row, you can write your own script. The MQL4 programming language is rather simple, being a derivative of C++. There is a complete and thorough set of documents online, and plenty of examples. However, one of the benefits of being a retail trader is that you can simply follow the market. You’re not trying to move it, you’re not trying to outsmart it. If something is rising in value, you buy it. It’s really that simple.

In this video, I talk about risk versus reward. Without a doubt, this is one of the most basic money management fundamentals that you have to follow. The one thing that you have to understand about trading is that you are not going to win all of your trades. The reality is that you are going to have losses from time to time. By using risk to reward analysis, you can help increase the odds in your favor longer-term. For example, if you’re risking 1 in order to make 5, you only need to be in order to break even. However, if you are risking 1 to make 1, you will likely lose money over the longer term as the losses will wipe out gains much quicker. Looking at a few trades, you can see that the first one is a massive hammer that formed at the bottom of the downtrend. This is typically a reversal signal, but if you use classic technical analysis and trading technique, you can see that on the hammer you would have to risk something akin to 550 pips. Now looking at the trade itself, you have to ask yourself how far can this particular pair go? In this case, you can make a real argument for the 155 level, but the problem is that you’re working against the trend. Because of this, you have to take that into account, and you can also find quite a bit noise on this chart at the 153 level, meaning that you are more than likely going to get 250 pips. This is an absolutely horrible risk to reward ratio and therefore this isn’t the type of trade that you want to take as you would almost always have to be correct on these setups.