After the first losses, many newcomers have the legitimate desire to study automated trading, which results in extra costs arising from the purchase of algorithms. In fact, you should not hurry, because free Forex expert advisors can fully reveal all the advantages and disadvantages of automation. Before considering the selection criteria for a free robot, we shall traditionally start with the species that should be forgotten right away without even wasting your time on testing.

So, the most popular “loser” is “Ilan”, which is often found under different names and with different additions, but it always uses the multiplication factor of the lot, making deals against the trend. Of course, there are certain situations when some of its versions may be helpful, but first things first.

Normally, many free Forex expert advisors are discussed on forums, come with enthusiasts’ instructions and contain the description of the parameters right in their code – i.e. they possess all the advantages of free software, so there will be no problems with detecting a dangerous algorithm: all you need is to read the reviews.

Since it makes no sense to slander the free algorithm, such opinions in most cases are quite objective. If there are few comments or no consensus, you can always run the algorithm in the tester, and if the results form a pattern similar to the negative comments, then it is not recommended to optimize such creation – it is just a waste of time.

Criteria that efficient and free Forex expert advisors meet

Let’s get back to averaging. Such a method is reasonable to use either in a partially automated strategy with a reliable filter for differentiating trend and flat portions of the market, or in the direction of the main trend, which means the transformation into pyramiding. In any case, a stop-loss or an unambiguous signal to fix a loss should be used in practice.

Free Forex expert advisors must work with any dealing center (hereinafter DC) – this is the next and equally important rule. The matter is that there is no algorithm that can’t be optimized under conditions of different companies. The only nuance is that the deviations can arise because of the different values of the spread, but for the majority of robots it is not critical, since the working free scalpers are extremely rare.

As a rule, the purpose of such optimization is regular advertising. Of course, if the algorithm suddenly appeared profitable, you can try to work under these conditions, but the danger is that fine-tuning under the terms of one DC leaves the trader face to face with the market and forces to look for new trading strategy in the case of minor changes in the offer, or even shutdown of the company.

Free Forex expert advisors: standard examples

Given the above, a good example is the “Pyramid” EA. In fact, there are lots of similar counterparts, the most important thing is to always fix losses by stop or signal and top up profitable orders – this approach allows to optimize almost any algorithm, the only thing left will be to choose the timeframe.

Another category of viable robots is scalpers trading at a breakthrough range – we will review one of the bright examples called Hedge Hog in more detail. To make it work correctly, you should optimize only two blocks of settings.

The first one is risk and organizational issues, such as the time difference with GMT and the way to modify orders. The second one is the values of the stop-loss and take-profit: by the way, the last is not necessarily to install –only trailing stop was used in the example. Test result on the hourly timeframe of the EUR/USD pair is presented below:

Brief comment on the results for the half year will be the following: the relative and absolute drawdown equal to 10.2% is a good result, but the profitability of 1.1 is though acceptable for a scalper, but still low. It is reasonable to test it on the other pairs, and possibly on metals. It should be noted that this result is objective and will be valid for the majority of the stable and free algorithms. It seems very unlikely to squeeze more out of free advisors.