You can find an interview with successful traders on many resources, who categorically declare the inability to make money at the foreign exchange market with a small capital. Indeed, to live on the income from the market, large investments are really required, but on the other hand, even recognized guru of finance once started with the basics. In the context of the specified problem, let’s consider the criteria that must be met by the Forex expert advisor for small deposits, and then assess a few examples.

Before you select and run any algorithm on a real account, it is necessary to take into account several important things. First of all, the robot won’t make millions of dollars from a hundred – moreover, in practice it is not even able to consistently double the deposit each month, regardless of what the advertising says, so at the early stage of the expert selection, it is reasonable to weed out any version of “Ilan” and other siphon-offs abusing the Martingale.

Secondly, the way to large-scale investments is only opened by a long history of testing on a real account, and there’s no better option than automated trading on a small deposit. This is due to the fact that all the interference from the dealing center (hereafter DC) and the problems in the code are fully revealed on actual accounts, i.e. when connecting to the appropriate server.

Therefore, investors often require to show the history of the EA operation on at least a minimum deposit for at least the last year. The experience proves that the amount of the test deposit is quite rarely taken into account, and these cases are more inherent to the derivatives market than to trading via the DC.

Forex expert advisor for small deposits in cents or dollars: which option to choose?

At first glance it may seem that there is no difference, but in fact there is some. First of all, there are several types of robots: scalpers (pipsers), midterms and longterms. For the first type it is allowed to open a small account in dollars, as a stop-loss fixes the minimum losses and thus makes it possible to work with the usual initial lot without overstating the risks.

In all other cases, the stops, as well as goals, are assumed much bigger by the number of points, so it is reasonable to use cent accounts which reduce the money risk a hundred times, thus ensuring the survival of the account at a distance. In addition, as the servers for the “cents” differ from the ordinary accounts, the different speeds of order execution are observed during trading.

The latter feature is a key moment for the trading robot, because the results obtained by the developer and on the basis of their own test can differ significantly. To solve most of these problems, the experts include the provision in the instructions that explain on what DC’s quotations and server the Forex expert advisor for small deposits was tested.

5MinScalper Expert – only the name inherited from the “scalper”, but it can earn

It was initially supposed to consider the algorithm for intraday trading and then pay attention to positioning, but an interesting free algorithm caught our eye during testing, which proved futile as a scalper, but in the medium-term trading it showed a surprising stability.

Forex expert advisor for small deposits called 5MinScalper is ideal for beginners, as it is built on a simple and fairly reliable strategy, under which the algorithm enters into transactions from the boundaries of the envelope. Envelope in this case is a dynamic equidistant channel, built by one central moving average and the given extent of deviation from it. Example of operation in such a channel is presented in the figure below:

To make the expert work correctly, you need to optimize two blocks of the settings, the first of which is the parameters of the envelope. Some resources believe that the robot has a special indicator, but it is a false statement, because the envelope is constructed automatically – all you need is specify the period of construction through the variable EnvelopePeriod, method of the moving construction EnvMaMethod (valid values: 0=sma, 1=ema, 2=smma, 3=lwma), and boundaries deviation (EnvelopeDeviation) from the center.

The second block is about placing the orders, support positions and the risk control. It should be noted that this strategy doesn’t use the usual stop-loss, only trailing is available, which can be enabled by the variable MaElineTSL=1, so the expert advisor "sits out" the losing trades, but due to the fact that the strict rules of capital management are used without averaging and multiplication of the lot, the negative consequences of such assumptions are minimized. Now let’s get back to the parameters of the orders:

• TimeOpen – an hour from which placing of pending orders is allowed;
• TimeClose – an hour of removing the quiescent "pendings";
• FirstTP, SecondTP and ThirdTP – since the robot sets three orders, each of them is assigned its own value of take-profit;
• Lots and MaximumRisk – basic lot and the maximum risk (the proportion of the deposit).

According to the results of optimization of the strategy tester, the algorithm showed profit of 9.31% of the investment over seven months of 2014 against the maximum drawdown of 6.1% – a very good result for the automated strategies without the use of stops. You can learn more about the results from the report presented below. In conclusion, the present midterm reveals that losing orders can be closed manually; this certainly complicates the problem but will improve the practical skill.

FX Lightning: another trend Forex expert advisor for small deposits

Finally, let us consider the very basic algorithm, which does not even require the optimization of the indicator settings. FX Lightning uses the classic strategy of the search entry points on pullbacks in the direction of the long-term trend. Each of the seven major currency pairs has its own algorithm, so for the correct trading with the currency portfolio, you need to install all seven files to the necessary directory of the terminal.

Considering Forex expert advisor for small deposits, it is necessary to focus on risks, so we should note that FX Lightning contains all the settings for managing capital – in particular, it allows you to work both with a fixed lot and to limit the risks as a percentage of assets. The figure below shows the results of testing of this robot from 01.01.2013 to 05.08.2014 on the EUR/USD pair quotes and InstaForex lots, which are 10 times smaller than the standard:

The neutral result was recorded on the selected pair, because the expert didn’t zero an account and earned almost nothing, but when you consider the fact that the authors recommend working simultaneously on all pairs (use all modules), this algorithm has a potential and a small cent deposit is very suitable for the test.