Do you want to create Forex EA without programming?
Many traders get frustrated when they start looking for how to create trading robots in MT4. Do not worry, my name is Petko Aleksandrov, the Chief trader at EA Forex Academy, and in this article, I will share with you what is the easiest way to create Forex EA without programming.
In the Academy, we use the Expert Advisor Studio. It is a strategy builder that we use to create Forex robots without programming skills. And thousands of our students are using it successfully.
I have selected to use the cryptocurrencies because I wanted to show you that it is possible to do it not just for the Forex pairs.
Before I show you how to create Forex EA without programming. I have to say that the most important first step is the Historical data. And you need to have reliable data before doing anything with Forex robots. We have a great FREE solution on our website that is called Forex Historical Data App.
You can use this app or you can import the Historical data from your MetaTrader platform using the data from your broker. If you go to data import, you will see the two scripts that you can use for MT4 and MT5.
This is the broker’s data from the server where you will be trading. For this example, I will trade with the Bitcoin, the Dash, the Ethereum, and the Litecoin. And now, if I go to the generator, I will have as a history data, data source, I have Pepperstone 01. And if I choose the drop-down menu, I have the Bitcoin, the Dash, the Ethereum and the Litecoin.
Now I am ready to work with EA Studio
How to create Forex Robot?
- export historical data from your broker for the asset you want to trade
- generate strategies with the data with predefined acceptance criteria
- filter the strategies in the collection and select the best performers
- export the strategy you wish to trade as a Forex Robot
Forex robot is every strategy that is automated properly in order to open and close trades according to predefined rules. The strategy builders allow us to create Forex EA without programming as Forex robots without mistakes in the code. And this is one of the most common problems if you code the Forex robot by yourself or you hire a developer.
What is the generator?
The generator is an automated process based on the history data we have imported in the strategy builder, which will generate strategies for us. And we can, after that, export each one of these strategies as a Forex robot. And place them on the trading platform, and they will trade automatically.
I will go quickly over the menu in EA Studio.
What will happen after the generator starts working?
It will put the profitable strategies into a collection. Now, with the collection, we have many filters that we can add. And you will see just the filtered strategies. After that, you can analyze any of the Forex Robots in the Strategy Editor.
The nice thing here is that if you have already some strategy, some existing strategy if you found any Forex robot over the internet, someone shares a video, and so on, you can immediately see if this Forex robot is working profitably or not. This is very important because this saves us so much time.
Let me just quickly show you what I mean. For example, if I choose Pepperstone, let’s say randomly I take the Dash. This is the time frame on H1 hour. You will see here I have the history data from 2017-29 of June until today.
I can add a Stop Loss and a Take Profit if I use them in my trading strategy. In other words, you add the entry and the exit conditions. You will see here is selected long entry. This means that we put entry conditions for buy:
For example, let’s take randomly the moving average period of 21.
How to create a Forex robot with different conditions for the indicators?
For every indicator we can select different parameters – MA falls, MA risses, the bar opens above the MA, etc.
If the bar opens above the moving average, it means it was below the moving average. And it will open above it. It means there is a cross of the moving average. And if I click on accept, I will be able to see what the result of this Forex robot is just using one indicator. Obviously it will be a disaster.
Even I put more indicators, randomly chosen indicators. For example, let’s take the MACD, and I select the MACD line rises. I click on accept I see this strategy is still losing. And this is very important. Because if you have any strategy using indicators usually what people do, they put this strategy on a demo account.
They test it for one month, two months until they realize the Forex robot is losing, and they start changing parameters. So, for example, they try with 15, and they work with 10. They look in YouTube people trying with different parameters for the indicators, and they change it, and change it and never actually having any profits or some good trade, some bad trade and they leave frustrated.
So even if you know how to create a trading robot in MT4 ot MT5 but you do not have the right strategy, you would be still losing.
The idea here is that you see the result immediately:
Just at the moment, I know the strategy is losing, and I don’t want to use it. Here if you have any ready strategy, if you’re going to test the strategy, you put your entry conditions, you put your Stop Loss, you put your exit conditions, and you will see the results immediately.
Now for every Forex robot, there is the optimizer:
This means that I can optimize strategy inputs before creating a Forex EA. And this means that the strategy builder will find better parameters for these indicators.
The other tool is the Monte Carlo which is a test for robustness for each Forex robot:
We have Multi-Market. So here we can test if this Forex robot is working on the other markets like the Bitcoin, the Ethereum, and the Litecoin.
And here is the report of the Forex Robot:
When we create a Forex Robot with the strategy builder, we have a lot of statistics:
- net balance
- maximum drawdown
- the most significant loss in percentage
- return to drawdown ratio
- count of trades
- how many trades we have
- ambiguous bars
I’m not going into in-depth details about the strategy builder. This is a little bit advanced. And I have a couple of courses actually about algorithmic trading and how you need to use precisely the EA Studio. But here I want to show you a brief presentation. So you will have an idea at the end of the article what is algorithmic trading, what are the strategy builders, and how to create Forex Robot using them.
One more time here, we have many tests for each strategy. And the last thing on the menu here is the portfolio.
Portfolio trading is unique for EA studio.
Something that is not available with the other strategy builders. Here you can trade many strategies in one Forex robot. Many strategies you can put it on the Meta Trader and they will trade for you automatically.
If I go to the generator and this strategy that I had it, I will remove it from the collection. I will go back to the generator, and I will show you how I am using the generator to generate strategies for me.
So for example, I will choose Pepperstone Bitcoin H1. This is on the H1 chart. And I will go to strategy properties. Here are the entry lots that we want to enter. Let’s say we want to go with 0.1.
I can choose whether I want to use a Stop Loss or a Take Profit for the Forex robot:
- “always use” this means I always want to have a Stop Loss and a Take Profit in the Forex robot.
- “may use” – I will leave it on the software to decide whether to use a Stop Loss or a Take Profit.
- “do not use” Obviously I don’t want to use Stop Losses or Take Profits.
Now I will choose always use and since the spread is $10 with the Bitcoin. I will need to write 10,000 pips and the point, just before the last two. And I will give it a little bit bigger range. The idea here is that I don’t want to limit the strategy builder with any criteria white it is creating forex robots for me.
But to provide it with a huge range to find more strategies and robust Forex robots. Now, the generator settings are where we choose the working minutes. How long time the generator will generate strategies for us?
Typically what I do to create Forex EA without programming
I set the generator approximately 8-9 hours simply at the end of the working day I set it working. And in the morning, when I’m in the office, I have ready strategies, ready collections. Only the generator is working while I am sleeping. Isn’t that the best way to create a Forex robot?
I will leave it, for example, to 500 minutes. And I will select Search best-this is the criteria that we want to arrange our strategies. The net balance is the most important, which strategy makes the most profit.
In sample and Out of sample is a really great tool that simulated Demo testing and you can learn more about it from the guide. For the purpose of this lecture, I am not going to use it at the moment.
The strategies fulfill the acceptance criteria – simple words the Forex Robot to have predefined limitations.
What are the acceptance criteria when we create a Forex robot?
We can add many things to the acceptance criteria. I like to use the most Profit Factor. It is calculated when we devide all the profits by all the losses. I always want to trade with strategies that have Profit facotr bigger than 1.2.
And when I create Forex EA without programming with EA Studio, I set in the accpetance criteria PF>1.
The next thing is the minimum net profit.
Let’s say, for example, $100 and what minimum count of trades we would like to have 50. I will leave it this way. You can add some more criteria if you want the strategy and what this means? If I go back to the generator that it will show only strategies that fulfill the acceptance criteria.
If I click on start, I can see the speed of the software, it’s quick, guys. For a few seconds I have many strategies calculated and already have some strategy into my collection as a Forex robot.
I can choose which Forex Robot for MT4 to use for my trading from the Collection
You see the first Forex robot made $750 and then we have the others going down. The longer I run the Generator the more strategies I will have and I will have a better chance to find a very nice and profitable Forex robot.
I can add some filters – still, we have these acceptance criteria, the maximum balanced deviation, maximum consecutive losses, count of trades, equity drawdown, this is the thing I was set to 5%. Using the filters I will leave only ten trading strategies that have less than 5% equity drawdown during the whole period.
Of course, you can add different filters, profit factor as well I prefer to stay at 1.2. I prefer to remain at 1.5 even and not only two, so I have a more significant profit factor. Having filters is the best way if you are a beginner and you don’t know how to create a trading robot in mt4.
The other filter that I usually use here is a maximum of consecutive losses. I usually don’t want to have more than ten consecutive losses in the Forex robot. For example, if I place 20, I will have more strategies into the collection 7 out of the 70, if I place ten they will call lower, and if I place 15 you will see that I have only 7, and if I put 5, for example, only one strategy will pass.
I will leave it to 10, and with one click I will create Forex EA without programming from each of the 10 trading strategies.
I will leave this generator working for the whole night, and tomorrow, I will see the final results. But if I decide to use any of the strategies I can easily export them as Forex robots for MT4 or MT5.
And I will leave it for 500 minutes to work and to generate strategies for me. The Expert Advisor Studio just generated more than 11,000 strategies for about 5 minutes and I have 96 into the collection.
If I click on each Forex Robot you can see the entry rules the Stop Loss and the Take Profit:
In this Forex Robot, we have:
- the awesome oscillator
- the RVI signal
- moving average crossover
Just what I was showing you as an example. But here is an exit condition, and if I click over the chart, you can see the indicators. And you can see exactly where the trades happened, where was the entry, where was the exit for all of the periods:
And for each strategy, you have the indicator chart, the balance chart, the equity, and you have the journal.
Here are the actual trades that happened during the tested period. And we have all the statistics for the Forex robot.
Net balance, maximum drawdown, return to drawdown ratio, count of trades, ambiguous bars, profit per day on an average basis, win to loss ratio, Sharpe ratio, and so on, so many things that I am not going into detail.
But the idea here is that we do this automatically. The Expert Advisor Studio calculates for us the strategies. We need to set up the inputs that we want, the criteria that we want. And these strategies must be created over the same server where I will be trading. And they’re using the same historical data.
The lovely thing with EA Studio since it’s a web-based program is that during the same time, while I am generating these strategies for the Bitcoin, I can open a new page and I will go again to EA studio. But the important thing here is to make it on a separate browser. Because this way, EA Studio works faster.
I will just login in as well. And I will do the same generation for the other cryptocurrency Forex robot.
How to create a trading robot in mt4 for Dash:
Also, for the H1 chart and then I will go to strategy properties, here 0.1, and let’s see how much was the spread with the Dash. I go back to the generator. I always put the minimum as a spread, and here I give it a more significant range so that I will use this as a minimum as well for the Take Profit. The generator settings also 500 minutes here.
Let’s see the acceptance criteria for this Forex robot. We said we want a minimum $100 of profit for our strategies, and that’s it pretty much. I click on Start, and now the generator will start creating strategies.
Now I will open in one more browser another EA Studio, and I will run there for the Ethereum. And I will run as well for the Litecoin.
So, I’m going to my account, log in, I go to the generator, and let’s see first how much was the spread. So, from here, I choose Pepperstone Demo 1, and here I choose Ethereum. The spread was 700, go to generator I choose the wanted cryptocurrency. I’m going to Ethereum.
You see that this way I really do not need Expert Advisor Coder or anyone with IT skills to do the work for me. It is awesome!
I select H1 as well, and I’m going to strategy properties, entry lot 0.1 again I will enter. I will put a minimum of 700 as I said this is the spread, another more significant number here and then 700 here. The acceptance criteria 500 minutes, let me see here I will put it again minimum net profit of $100, generator, and I click on start.
And the last one I will open one more browser. I go to the EA studio. I will just quickly log in, and I am going to the generator, and first, let’s see again the spread, go-to the strategy I choose the broker server, and I choose the Litecoin. Here I have 500 as a spread. I’m going to the generator 500 is $5. Because this is in pips to make sure I am clear.
How to create a Robot for Forex trading with the Litecoin:
And I’m going to H1 again. Strategy properties, so the minimum is the spread here, is exactly like that. I will give a little bit a more significant range again. I will go to 0.1. The Forex robot properties here I will go for 500 minutes again and acceptance criteria I would like to have a minimum of $100.
I am going to the generator, I click on start, and now I have these 4 generators as you can see working over here and I will leave them over the night.
Tomorrow morning what I will have? I will have ready strategies into the collection, already hundreds of strategies; these are different strategies. What do we do after that? We select the best ones, and we place them on a demo account for trading, and after that, we follow their performance.
I will show you how we follow the performance of the Expert Advisors, and we place on a separate live account only the best Expert Advisors.
But I can afford to do that just because I know how to create MT4 robot that works great and I do it easily with EA Studio.
This way, we automate the whole process, and you know how to create a trading robot in mt4 now.
Anyway, this process would be impossible if we don’t have these strategy builders. Because even we have some strategies for manual trading, they are not so many. And their result it’s tough to be backtested.
And actually, to automate this whole process takes so much time if I use, for example, developers because I was using this system for a long time, I was giving strategies to developers to automate them as Forex robot. Obviously this was a horrible process, it was taking so much time and so much money.
Because one strategy, a straightforward strategy like this one to be automated by a developer that would cost somewhere around $200 to $300, depending on the entry conditions they charge you even more and they take so much money. Obviously, in the code of the Expert Advisor of the Forex robot, it’s possible to have mistakes.
With the strategy builders, we eliminate the mistakes, and we are sure into the code. And obviously, this gives us the opportunity to trade a portfolio of different strategies.
For example, what I will do after I create Expert Advisor without programming for each asset?
I will select the best three strategies from Bitcoin, the best three strategies from Ethereum, the Lite, and the Dash. In other words, I will have 12 different strategies on four different cryptocurrencies, and I will place them in the same trading account, which will give me a good diversification of the risk.
I will not put all the risk into one strategy, into one Forex robot, into one cryptocurrency, but I will divide the risk, I will diversify the risk.
This is pretty much about it. There are free videos over the internet on how to use EA studio. There are free materials, so that’s why I’m not going into details.
In the help of the EA Studio:
There is so much more information about each one section, I just showed you in this article the very basic, so you can have an idea what are the strategy builders, how we create strategies, hundreds of strategies, actually thousands of strategies. So now you know how to create MT4 Robot.
I show in the Cryptocurrency Trading Course – from A to Z how I export the strategies and how I put them on Meta Trader for trading.
So how to create an Expert Advisor without programming?
- use strategy builders that will put your strategy together and export it as EA
- use the generator which will show you new strategies even you do not have any
- hire a developer to do it, but this will take you a lot of time and resources
The last option is to learn to Forex robot programming, but this is not what I like to do. I am a trader, not an IT.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me in our FORUM.
For more cryptocurrency trading courses, please visit:
https://eatradingacademy.com/courses/cryptocurrency-trading/
Want to create a Forex robot without programming? What about downloading our EA robot and try it out for free!
How to create a Forex robot?
There are three ways to create a Forex robot. One is to code it by yourself on MQL in MetaTrader. The second is to hire a developer to automate your strategy. The third is to use a Forex strategy builder and export the ready code.
What are the Forex robots?
These are automated trading strategies. The rules for entry and exit are coded and ones the Robot is attached to the chart it opens and closes the trades automatically.
Why Forex robots are so popular?
When the traders use Forex robots they avoid the emotions in trading which is the main reason why many loose on the market. Also, the trader spends less time in front of the monitors.
What is the best Forex robot?
The best Forex robot is the one that is created by yourself over historical data of your broker. Robustness tests are recommendable before start trading.