Almost every beginner asks the following question: how to write a Forex expert advisor. Motifs for such aspirations can be different – from trying to partially or fully automate the manual strategy to banal laziness. In the latter case, the disappointment will appear quickly, because the practice proves that creating strategies is much easier than learning to program.

Before you deal with writing a Forex advisor, we would recommend making a sober estimate of your strength and free time, as you will have to spend a lot of "man-hours" on training. But if you approach the issue responsibly, it will open up broad prospects – not only you will save time, because the robot will trade, but services of writing the robots also enjoy a good and stable demand, so you can earn extra money.

How to write advisor for MetaTrader, what to start with

Most independent traders are trading on the Forex market via dealing centers using MetaTrader terminal, which has the fourth and fifth versions. It would seem that the programs are almost identical, but programming languages are a little different, so if you have MetaTrader4, you should learn MQL4 programming language, if you use MetaTrader5, it uses its own MQL5 language.

It should be noted that in any case MT5 is the future, and sooner or later you will need to work with that terminal, but right now the beginner is recommended to find out how to write an advisor for MT4, because there’s too much information and training materials on this topic online and it will be much easier to retrain. So, it is recommended to start with textbooks, the most popular and detailed of which can be found in the MQL4 community. It looks as follows:

You can find all the answers in this tutorial, backed by specific examples which are allowed to copy, upgrade and test in real time. In addition, users regularly publish articles and share their developments there, so it is possible to constantly expand horizons and communicate with professionals. You can go directly to the resource from the terminal.

Before you create your first robots, it is recommended to master simple programs – indicators and scripts, because when implementing the strategy it is often required to create your own indicators that would help the advisor.

How to write a Forex advisor with special programs is another common question among the beginners. Actually, using such solutions is not recommended for a simple reason – they have a limited functionality, which allows you to create only simple robots, like the ones built on the channel breakdown or the moving average, but the sophisticated algorithms might be a problem, and you won’t be able to present any idea in the form of the code. Moreover, they are paid and don’t encourage to think, failing to develop the skills.

The last stage of the advisor development is optimization and testing. In contrast to the mentioned above, here everything is easy – it is enough to know just the simplest methods of statistics to objectively evaluate the results. In general, this isn’t worth mentioning because it is not directly related to programming, except for code revisions after parameters correction, but without it the work on advisor development will not be complete.