Forex expert advisors have really grown in popularity in recent years. For so long they were the preserve of large financial institutions, but now they are available at a very reasonable price to the ordinary trader. So why are expert advisors so popular?

Well the main reason is because these programs or robots enable you to profit from forex trading without actually having to trade yourself. All you do is download the software, configure it to run on MetaTrader4 and allow it to run in the background. The expert advisor will then place trades automatically for you based on the trading criteria that it’s programmer has pre-configured.

So therefore you don’t really need to know anything about forex trading in order to use expert advisors, although at least a little of knowledge is advised in order to configure the software correctly.

It is very difficult to come up with your own profitable trading method so thankfully these expert advisors can trade for you. They are programmed to look for high probability set-ups so over the long term many of these systems have more winning trades than losing ones.

This isn’t always the case of course. No expert advisor can win all the time. There are still occasions when you will be stopped out at a loss, and ultimately the success or failure of a particular EA depends entirely on the skills of the programmer. If it has been programmed to use sound trading principles such as a tight stop loss policy, for example, then there’s no reason at all why an expert advisor can’t make consistent long-term profits for it’s user.

The major benefit of an expert advisor is therefore it’s potential profitability. It can take several years for you to devise your own successful trading methods, so you can bypass this steep learning curve by using an automated trading robot instead.

Furthermore an expert advisor is extremely convenient because even if you become a successful forex trader yourself, forex trading basically just becomes a job, albeit a very lucrative one, that requires you to sit staring at a computer screen all day long. An EA can be set up and left running during the day and can take positions for you without any intervention needed from you at all.

You can often turn them on and off at will and in some cases can configure them to suit your own particular trading style. So you can take a pre-existing expert advisor and tweak them to make them even more profitable.

So overall it’s easy to see why forex expert advisors are becoming increasingly popular. Whether you are a professional trader or a complete newbie, an expert advisor has multiple benefits.

For reviews of individual forex expert advisors please click here to read James Woolley’s Forex Tracer review and Silicon Forex review.