Expert-Advisor checking and adjustment
The Expert-Advisor MOT … because it’s your money!
The market for MetaTrader trading systems, indicators, templates and tools is nearly unmanageable by now. There are hundreds of sites and providers. However, the quality of the most Expert-Advisors is in the fewest cases associated with the price. Many extremely expensive systems, which you can purchase on various dubious sites, are only programmed very simply and in most cases they even don’t have a simple error-handling.
Based on a not irrelevant number of negative experiences of our customers we can assure you that an investment in a check of an expert advisor is normally much better than the uncontrolled activation of a bad (careless) programmed trading system. A small expansion with a professional error collecting routine or a reliable management of open trades is often cheaper than simply activating a bad programmed system/script/indicator and to hope for the best.
Below you find some examples for typical errors (often even very expensive) in trading systems which have caused a lot of costs for our customers.
• Missing error-handling: While back-testing many errors, which occur not until the real trading, are not recognizable. During the development of a trading system on the basis of historical data there are ideal (unreal) market conditions. However, in real trading with all the typical “phenomenons” like spread-variance, off-quotes, re-quotes, delay of data, server-busy-problems, broker-busy-problems etc. missing functions may have a quick and negative effect on such normal problems and are therefore very expensive. Back-testing a trading system is a static structure and neither knows time nor data-problems. However, in real trading conditions an EA has to react to a high number of possible problems by corresponding through predefined algorithms, so that at least no capital investment is being destroyed because of the way of the programming was done.
• Uncontrolled risk-management: Do you also know Expert Advisors which carry out dozens of trades per day? Even if every single of these trades seems to be small, the quantity results in an impressive amount. Many producers of EAs not only make money out of the selling, but also out of every trade which is being carried out on your MetaTrader depot. These EAs are often programmed for one single target: Trade, trade, trade, … At the end the seller of the trading system has earned assets by selling you an overpriced product which has also traded into the pocket of the seller with every trade because of clever contracts with the broker. You should permit an expert to draw up an analysis about potential risks, so that such EAs not only trade into the pocket of the seller and take uncontrolled risks in doing so. There we are also at your disposal.
• Uncontrolled money-management: Numerous EAs use very aggressive (often totally uncontrolled) methods for the determination of the position-size of the trade. Often only the simple Martingale principle is being used without considering the risks and consequences. Thereby it is tried to compensate previous losses by aggressive enlargement of the positions after failed trades. However, this principle of the enlargement of the lot size of successive trades should only be used in absolutely exceptional circumstances and under observance of certain rules. Things which seem to work excellent in the back-testing with well-directed manipulation – trading without loss – leads in the practice sooner or later always to a total loss. You should always expect a loss of your total capital in a short time when you have a system on the basis of the Martingale principle. Here you find a small sample calculation.
• Curve fitting: Due to the flexible possibilities for the settings of the trade parameters in MetaTrader it’s possible to let every EA appear profitable over a selected period of time. Basically a back-test is only a very small help assessing the quality and profitability of a trading system. When the back-test is being shown by the provider “by pure chance” for example for exactly 2 years and 3 months then you should be very careful; normally this isn't a fortuity… ask the producer for a longer back-testing. We gladly help you also with the assessment of the quality of your EA.
