Paid Forex Robots — Why Avoid Them?

Why to avoid paid Forex robots or expert advisors? There are several reasons, but the most obvious one is quite simple — they do not work as advertised.

First, let's get straight with the definitions — Forex robots are the same thing as the automated expert advisors, they are some trading strategies (sometimes advanced, sometimes not) embedded into a program code, which is most often intended for the MetaTrader 4 (more rarely, MetaTrader 5) platform.

There are many free expert advisors available on popular Forex websites and forums and there are also many paid ones that are sold online. The price of such paid Forex robots may vary from as low as $20 to as high as $499, while the average price seems to be near $100. In extremely rare cases, the price may even go up to thousands USD.

When it comes to free expert advisors, they are usually quite raw, require some optimization and tuning from time to time, and work with just minimum profit (even the best of them). As for paid Forex software, it is usually advertised as a complete turn-key solution — a ready-to-use product that will get updates and support from the author free of charge; it is also advertised with an unbelievable level of profitability, sometimes with 100%+ gain per month. So, what are the issues with paid Forex trading robots?

1. The most obvious question that arises when you see a Forex robot advertisement that promises huge returns in a short time is why doesn't the author of this robot use it on their own Forex account? Really, why rely on some online sales at $99 per piece with all the troubles connected with setting up a site for selling, an affiliate program, user support, and so on if you can just turn on this "money-printing machine"? And if you are using it for trading and earn huge amounts of money from it daily, why bother selling the software? Do you want to share your success? Just let the traders download it for free! When we find a good EA, which, in my opinion, is capable of being profitable I share it for free on EarnForex.com; many other honest traders do the same. So, if you are using a robot and it is profitable, you already earn enough not to worry about selling it, and if you are selling a robot as a money-maker and not using it yourself, then that looks very suspicious.
2. Verifying the profitability and the potential drawdown of the paid expert advisors is very difficult, almost impossible. Advertisements display nice charts with exponential curves of balance, suggesting a lot of potential profit from using the robot. But the problem is that all these test reports and statistics can be easily forged to show any desired result. Some Forex robot sellers use sites similar to Myfxbook to demonstrate the profitability of their EAs. And while this is really a good tool, it has some disadvantages, including soft demo account conditions with almost no requotes or serious slippage, fast quote changes, "market blackouts", etc. Even though many of the advertised Forex robots have some sort of money-back guarantee declared, it isn't clear whether it is real or if one can truly estimate the usefulness of the EA in a 30-day period.
3. The entire Forex software industry is getting quite ugly lately. Quite a few paid Forex robots are advertised aggressively via rather generous affiliate schemes, which results in tons of spam over forums, YouTube, e-mail, and other parts of the Internet. Of course, it isn't the creators of the software who spam the web, but rather affiliate marketers (and probably not the best of them), but that is still a problem for the Forex industry. The ads often contain misleading claims, wishful thinking, and even outright lies, which is very dangerous for all potential FX traders. New traders may fall for such ads easily, resulting in an imminent disappointment in the currency market. People who don't know about Forex might think that it is some kind of a get-rich-quick scheme (which, of course, it isn't) or some other scam. So, the paid Forex robot market is currently set up in such a way that it greatly hurts the reputation of the entire foreign exchange trading industry.

That is what you have to know about paid Forex robots. That is why you don't see any ads for them on EarnForex.com. Of course, we might be wrong in our judging and you are free to believe otherwise. However, this guide should serve as a warning to newbie traders, while, certainly, experienced currency traders are already wise enough to see what is good or bad for them.

If you have any questions or comments regarding paid Forex robots, you can post them on our forum.