subject: Metatrader Trading Software [print this page] Trading platforms such as MetaTrader has contributed much to the growth of the retail Forex trading industry. They gave small-time traders the opportunity to participate in the Forex market, which was previously available only to banks and institutional investors.
On a different note I will not explain what an expert advisor is.
What is an Expert Advisor?
An Expert Advisor is an automated trading robot for MetaTrader. The computer does all of the buying and selling for you. Trading through MQL software solves one of the biggest problems that traders face - their emotions. All that it needs to function is a set of rules. Whenever the market matches the rules, it automatically places the trade. It never second guesses itself or decides to skip trades. Better yet, it never gets tired. You can trade 24 hours a day.
Expert Advisors can do all sorts of things. Say, for example, that you want to open a new trade with a 50 pip stop loss. If that stop gets hit, you want to lose 1% of your account, which most forex traders call money management. You would have to do all of those calculations in your head, open the order box, type the correct lot size into the order box, then push send. Or, the expert advisor could accomplish all of those steps in a fraction of a second.
Traders often use expert advisors as order management tools. They prefer to retain control of when to enter the market, but do not want sit in front of the screen for the next 4 hours waiting for an exit. Trading with softtware solves this problem. It can actively listen and wait while you go about your full time ob
Most traders prefer to fully automate their strategies from start to finish. The set of rules that they develop answers three basic questions.
How do you know when to enter the market?
How do you know when to exit the market?
How do you handle the forex money management?
Many expert advisor developers add a few bells and whistles to their strategies. The most commonly requested add ons are:
Trailing stops
Trading hours (i.e., only trade between the Euro and US sessions)
Stops and Take profits
Money management
No trading on Friday and/or Sunday
The ability to close all open trades on Friday afternoon, which eliminates the risk of market gaps from holding trades over the weekend.
The great thing about trading robots is that so many sites exist on the internet to share them. Many popular forex forums discuss different indicator and strategy ideas. The community around the MetaTrader platform helps facilitate the development process.
The biggest challenge with developing an expert advisor is communicating the idea clearly. Many obvious or intuitive ideas in trading like "up trend" or "divergence" are actually subjective concepts. You will need to turn these ideas in quantifiable indicators with either numbers or lines on the chart to make the expert advisor behave consistently.
