Automated Forex Trading - Is there hope?

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Hello all,

I have been trading the Forex market for 4 years and I need automated trading strategies due to a change in my employment status (and I'm not a very profitable trader and need a change in direction.)

I am looking to find out if anyone has past/present experience or considering automated trading for the future.

Please, I am looking to visit and contribute to threads around this topic, does anyone know of any good threads here?

Thanks and looking forward to your replies.

Ian

 

I am a manual trader and don't prefer automated forex trading. Which automated trading software are you using?

 

According to me, there may be some hope in manual trading but not in automated trading. As automated trading is done with help of robots and they are not good to make profit.

 

I’ve been trading forex since 2002 (so it's been 20 years and more), back when MetaTrader was transitioning from version 3 to 4. I still clearly remember the first time I used MT4, not even realizing that it supported automatic trading through Expert Advisors (EAs).

To this day, I can’t fully confirm or deny whether there’s real hope in relying on automatic trading. I’m still in a grey area myself, though I do lean toward believing that automation can help me make money—mainly because I know I’m not great at manual trading. Emotions and time constraints mess with my mindset too much, and that’s ultimately what pushed me to depend on automated systems.

From my experience—and from others around me—both manual and automated trading can deliver solid results. It really depends on how you use them: how well you process data, manage risk, write algorithms, design your EA code, and so on.

Even when buying an EA from the market, you still need to figure out whether it truly works for you. Just because it looks good on paper doesn’t mean it’ll perform the same on your setup. There are always factors behind that, and it’s your job to uncover them.

So in short, you’ve got to explore everything yourself—manual, automated, or even a mix of both—to find what actually suits you best.

 

Automation can be profitable; BUT automation is, well, automation. If you're not already a profitable trader, then automating what you do isn't going to magically make you profitable. That's just how automation works, like I can automate the process of making a doughnut but if said doughnut sucks before I brought in automation then it's still going to suck after automation. Automation, in and of itself, doesn't make anything inherently better or worse.

Generally using other people's automation isn't going to work either because let's be brutally honest here, why would anyone but you care if you're rich or not? Not understanding that gets so many people in trouble, they somehow want to believe that the rich, the successful, will also want them to be rich but generally that's further from the truth. That's not to say it's impossible to make money with free EA's, I'd recommend downloading a few hundred and forward testing them. Then you can run your EA's like a trading floor, "hiring and firing" the bots, giving some more capital allocation, etc. But everyone expects to just go online, ask "what's best bot!?", download that bot and print money. Sorry but ain't how it works, slick.

 

I often say that an ounce of profitable logic is worth a pound of efficient code.

It may sound tough to believe, but learning code can be done faster than devising profitable logic. Having said that, it's extremely inefficient to analyze historic data manually in order to come up with a statistically profitable strategy. Frankly, this is how I got started in trading in 1999.

Also, a non-programmer is never going to support auto trading because they can't write code, so they can't very well trust it.

My own custom Expert Advisor profitably trades Gold 21 hours per day and 5 days per week. Its logic is detailed but not highly complex. At times, I really can't believe I didn't devise the logic sooner.

Whether you search for someone else's work product or choose to go it alone, it's a needle in a haystack.

 
So basically from your description you have had a change in employment status and are banking on trading to get you out a hole .Red flag from the start , desperate people do desperate things and make mistakes and trading and certainly bots are not the route you should go in this scenario . I've been trading for 17 years doubled accounts , blew a few etc etc .I would never rely on retail trading to pay the bills and certainly not at the hands of coders for profit with eye candy back tests and gimmicks and suspect reviews and sales to rope needy people into losing more cash . Retail trading should be a side gig and it can work with the right mindset and discipline and patience 20 % ,30 % in a year  ROI possible but that's boring people want 1000% ROI coder for profit martingale dreams. Trading should be boring and a grind if it is not you are doing it wrong. 
 
Victor Paul Hamilton #:
Retail trading should be a side gig

In my experience, being unable to fully devote myself to trading was an impediment to succeeding.

Just like any other business, total dedication, sufficient capital, and a highly detailed plan supported by data are required for success.

 
There's always hope. You need to have your own working manual strategy and code it.
 
James McKnight #:

Automation can be profitable; BUT automation is, well, automation. If you're not already a profitable trader, then automating what you do isn't going to magically make you profitable. That's just how automation works, like I can automate the process of making a doughnut but if said doughnut sucks before I brought in automation then it's still going to suck after automation. Automation, in and of itself, doesn't make anything inherently better or worse.

I think it's a lot deeper than this when you consider that trading is an art more so than a science, and you can't automate art. Automation of trading has unique pros and cons, it is a trader without a brain, and of course without emotion. An EA will keep its loss running, while a human can look at a sudden data release and anticipate a sudden break of the market structure. The main difference is that humans can "intelligently" cut losers sooner, that is...if they know that they really should, and if they know what they're doing.

 
I believe OP has been able to code his strategy in the last 13 years.
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