Euro-Blaster

But let’s be honest. Those are very isolated situations indeed. Most of the time, the market hums along doing its thing and is best traded with a disciplined, rules-based methodology. And this is where an automated trading robot can excel. Rules and discipline are its bread and butter.

About nine months ago I deposited a fairly large sum into an account at Oanda and began my Forex trading adventure. Well, recently it ended in a rather abrupt fashion with my account balance sitting at a whopping $24.50. Yes, you read that right — not even enough left to grab a decent dinner out — pretty much a wipe-out.

Believe it or not, I had plenty of winners to go with the losers. In fact, I am quite confident that I had more winners than losers by a decent margin. My downfall was my inability to stick to my predefined take profit and stop loss levels. I was typically too greedy to close out my gains and too shocked to close out my losses. In fact, one of my losses ended up being over $5,000. Now, I made some stupid decisions and obviously exhibited a great lack of discipline, and looking back, I can’t help but ask myself how I allowed that to happen. But when you are “in the moment,” it’s amazing how your mind will play games with you. Many of you reading this know exactly what I am talking about. It’s the rare Forex trader that hasn’t blown up at least one account.

Perhaps more than anything else, it takes unwavering discipline to stay very long in this game of Forex. Trading robots/expert advisors are the very definition of discipline. They are cold-blooded, emotionless trading ninjas. Time after time they make trading decisions based only upon math and logic, and nothing sways them from this objective. They don’t ever feel that they have to “get back” at the market after a loss. After a win they don’t get overconfident and reenter the market on a less than perfect signal. They don’t make poor decisions on account of having been up too late the previous night. They don’t miscalculate lot sizes or take profit levels. In short, in many ways they are much better adapted to trading the markets than we humans are.

Now, does this mean that all expert advisors make money? No, of course not. In fact, the majority lose money. Underlying a robot’s ability to trade without emotion must be a solid trading methodology. That goes without saying. But once a good system is combined with the discipline of a computer, you have the potential for something quite special.

Stay tuned as we take a look at the Euro-Blaster expert advisor in more detail in coming days.