What You Need To Know about Metatrader 4 Expert Advisor

The Metatrader 4 expert advisor range is the most popular range of forex autopilot software. There is a wide choice of expert advisors designed to run on this free downloadable platform or framework that sets a structure for EAs to be built on. Whichever expert advisor (EA) you choose will act as a robot on the forex market, trading for you according to the boundaries that you set.

Clearly this has many advantages over making all of the moves in a trade yourself. The EA does not need breaks for eating, sleeping and human contact. Neither does it suffer from human weaknesses such as fear and over optimism which can distract us from our systems and lead us to exit a trade too soon or not soon enough. Once you have set it up it will obey your system to the letter all the time that it is online.

An EA will often protect your interests when you could not do it yourself. The opportunity to set a trailing stop is one example. A trailing stop automatically moves up with rising prices but stays in place if the market falls. This means that on a successful trade it protects a part of your profits without exiting too soon. On an unsuccessful trade it protects you from heavy losses just as a standard stop would do.

Some of the functions of an expert advisor depend on having it constantly connected to the internet. This because MT4 and the EA run on your own computer or server, not on your broker's servers. For example if you have set a trailing stop, MT4 sends a message to your broker account to move the stop each time and it has to be connected to the internet to do that.

This means that to make the most of the potential of a Metatrader 4 expert advisor on a home computer you have to leave your computer online 24 hours Sunday night thru Friday unless you happen to have exited all of your trades before you stop work on any particular day.

Any break in the connection will mean that no more messages are sent to your brokerage so the trailing stop will be left where it was last set. It will still protect you from a large loss but it will not move up any more so you will have lost some of the advantage of having a system that works while you sleep.

However, some EAs can be hosted remotely. This means that you can set them up on an internet server instead of your own computer. This could be your own or a facility offered by the EA company. They may offer this option as an upgrade after you order their Metatrader 4 expert advisor.