It is common knowledge that the Foreign currency Exchange (FOREX) market is the largest and most liquid financial market in the world, with average daily trade in the global FOREX markets exceeding US$1.9 trillion. These huge funds are traded by governments, banks, and large institutions. FOREX has a 18.4% average growth rate per year since 1989. It offers trading 24 hours a day, five days a week, non-stop over Internet. This kind of massively liquid and long uninterrupted trading hours mean that under normal conditions there is no problem entering or exiting a trade.
A striking fact about this market is that 90% of new FOREX traders lose all their money within their first 3 months of trading. Why? it is not for lack of intelligence, but by humans’ weaknesses which is common to all -traders and non-traders alike.
By human weaknesses, we talk of factors like Greed, Fear, Indiscipline, Lack of confidence, Hesitation, Tiredness, Inconsistency,
Automated Forex trading has come a long way. As a programmer’s skills improve, and as more breakthrough is achieved in artificial intelligence, more and more tasks requiring intelligence can be assigned to machines or Robots. Practical experience shows that a high quality automated trading software always guaranties some kind of financial success when deployed on the Forex market. To this end, the Automated Trading Championship sponsored by FXCM (Forex Capital Markets LLC), Interbank FX LLC (IBFX), FXDD and the TRADERS’ magazine and organized by MetaQuotes Software Corp. is a world yearly competition where all participants use Expert Advisors (Forex EA, robots). In the 2007 competition, the champion won 1204.75% profit, the runner-up won 450.42%, and the third place won 299.45%, in just a period of 12 weeks of trading.
Trading Forex, using some trading systems, programs, software or robots (on Metatrader MT4 platform it is called as Expert Advisors - EA), without needing a human to physically trade is called Automated trading system. An automated trading system is a group of specific rules and parameters, governing entry and exit points, having the ability to both generate signals and execute trades automatically. An EA is an automated trading “robot”.
In the development of trading robots, programmers consider: nature of the market, mathematical modeling, time frame, entry and exit signals, stop loss trigger, and profit target, etc. More developed systems include money management rules. After the system is created, they do back testing and forward testing rigorously both in demo and live accounts. A fully automatic trading system created like this way is able to analyze the market independently, work completely on its own and constantly generate signals, auto-execute in a trading platform. There are also ’semi-automated’ systems whereby users can be alerted when the Entry, Exit, Stop Loss or Take Profit trigger occurs. Alerts can be audible through computer, sent to E-mail address or even sent as a message to cell phone. Once the user confirms, the robot will obey the order to finish the trade.
Some of the advantages of robots trading are:
(a) Automated execution of trade by a computer at incredible speed and flawless precision and accuracy.
(b) Emotion-free trading that is never affected by greed, fear, indiscipline, lack of confidence, hesitation, tiredness and inconsistency.
(c) 24/5 constant operation, watching for and taking action (buy or sell) when the best opportunities (defined by the programmer) shows up.
(d) Multiple trade actions can be taken synchronously like: multiple conditional entries and exits, profit targets, protective stops, trailing stops. Such powerful function can help us to maximize our return of investment, and reduce risk.
(e) Because computers are incredibly faster than humans, using robots means no more missing a trading opportunity.
One popular robot that is the pride of big part of traders is the PFX robot.