Free Expert Advisors: What to Look For

Free expert advisors for forex trading can be found online if you know where to look. However, before you go ahead and grab one, take a moment to think about what you should be looking for.

Expert advisors or EAs are automated forex trading systems or robots that work on the Metatrader 4 software platform. MT4 itself is free, and as with most software, there are some people who have developed free applications that you can download. They may hope for donations, they may hope for some kind of paid work to come from becoming known for this, or they may just do it for fun. But the question that you must always ask is: what is the system that they have automated?

If you think about it, it is pretty clear that anyone with a profitable forex trading system is not very likely to spend hours of his time creating robot software to run it automatically and then give it away as a free expert advisor. Nor is he going to pay a programmer to create the software and then give it away for free. No, either he will keep his robot for himself or he will hope to make a lot of money by selling it.

This means that the free expert advisors that are available on the internet are not necessarily the best automated forex systems. You might be lucky and find one that is great, but you could spend a lot of time trying out free expert advisors that never make money or do not even work.

Then you have a problem because support is likely to be minimal. How could somebody spend hours of their time helping you to fix any problems that you have, if they are never being paid anything for it? Most people have to earn a living. Maybe they had a few spare hours or days to create the robot in the first place, but that does not mean they have spare time to devote to you and your problems when you try to use it, which could be months or years after they developed it.

Besides this, there may not be much in the way of instructions for setting up. This may not sound like a problem until you try it. Forex robots are notoriously difficult for the non technically minded among us, and if you do not even have much of a manual and nobody to answer your emails, the outlook is bleak.

In fact, free forex robots could end up costing you a lot of time and perhaps also a lot of money, if you are unwise enough to let them loose on your real money account before you have fully tested them. Free expert advisors are not necessarily an unmixed blessing.