Advantages of Automated Forex Trading

Trading with expert advisors is seen by many (especially newbie) traders as the "holy grail" of Forex. Such traders expect from each EA they find or buy fast and risk-free profits. Of course, expert advisors are not the "holy grail" of FX trading. Automated trading is just another tool that can make the trader's life a bit easier and sometimes even more profitable. Here is the list of the advantages of trading Forex with expert advisors:

• With expert advisors, you can trade during the time you cannot trade manually. You can set up an expert advisor to trade for you when you are asleep, when you are away, or when you are too busy to be involved in trading. Of course, you can hire someone else to trade for you when you are away, but that is a rather ineffective solution.
• Strictly following the trading system is another advantage of automated Forex trading. If you have a strategy implemented in the expert advisor, it will trade according to that strategy without any deviations. If you find it hard to follow your own system without modifying it constantly, try using an EA that would execute your system.
• Automated trading excludes any emotions from your market behavior. Computers and programs do not have any emotions and will not overtrade if they lose. If you are not very good at controlling your emotions, automated trading will definitely help you.
• Complex strategies are not a problem for expert advisors. For a live trader, it is not an easy task to monitor a dozen of indicators and compare each of them with the entry conditions, whereas expert advisors can do that easily and in no time at all.
• Errare humanum est said the Roman stoic. It means that despite your experience in Forex trading, you will make a lot of stupid mistakes through your trading career. Computers are not humans, and if programmed without errors, expert advisors will not commit any mistakes when trading.
• There are many things a live trader just cannot do — trading multiple strategies, timeframes, and currency pairs simultaneously is one of them. If you want to use your system on several currency pairs and timeframes — use an expert advisor. If you want to test several systems at the same time — you should also use an expert advisor.
• The time of reaction, analysis, and decision making can be critical in many Forex trading systems. Where manual trader just cannot do it fast enough, automated systems will work fine.

Perhaps, I have missed some important advantages here, but this list looks quite impressive to me. Of course, there are certain disadvantages in the automated Forex trading, but they are a different subject altogether.