Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Forex Trading with Robots

Forex Trading Robots


Automated or automatic forex can be defined as the ability to trade forex with the use of a trading program or forex trading robot, without needing a human to physically trade a forex system. With forex, automated trading is an emerging field that began not that long ago.

There are 2 general categories of automated trading:

  • Automated trading through managed forex. Some, though not all, forex managed accounts are traded via automated forex. In either case, the trading is passive in that you don’t have to do it. But in the case of automated forex, the trading program or robot executes the trades of their trading system, rather than a human team.
  • When you program your own or someone else’s forex system into a program with programming and automatic trading abilities such as MetaTrader, or other trading program. Wealth Lab required programming skills (the programming language used is similar to Pascal), while other programs just emerging that will allow you to select parameters and test your system performance.

Advantages of automatic forex trading systems


What are the advantages of automated or automatic forex trading, whether it’s with a managed forex account using a trading robot, which is a much easier way as you do not have to design or program a system?

They are:

  • You do not have to physically trade the system.
  • Automated trading can take trades at anytime of the day or night. This is particularly important for systems where the performance is increased when taking a majority of trades in the system, which occurs in systems where trading opportunities occur at times when the person may be sleeping or otherwise cannot get to the computer. So being available for trading 24 hours a day, unlike a trader can, will the profitablility of these systems.
  • You can trade multiple systems, such as systems that rely on different types of indicators, or which trade shorter or longer time frames, in order to diversify risk, as well as to smoothen out your equity curve and reduce drawdown.
  • An automated system is unaffected by a trader’s psychology, which can sometime cause a system to be not traded properly. If your trader discretion causes you to improve performance, then that is fine, but if it causes a worse performance than if you traded the system mechanically, then this is an issue that is overcome by automated forex.
  • Enables the development of new systems that may be difficult for a human to trade, such as systems with a high frequency of trades using tick data. Designing a system is no longer be limited by how practical or easy it is for a person to trade it.

These benefits of automated forex of course is based on the fact that:

  • You have chosen a profitable forex system and has acceptable drawdown, as evidenced by historical performance.
  • The forex system is not just mechanical, but is fully programmable.
  • You are aware, with either active trading or automated trading, that you must monitor the performance to see that the system is still working as well as its past performance.

Hence, that's why it's mentioned that you'll have to use a automated forex provider including managed forex with MetaTrader for those inclined that

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