Optimizing an Expert Advisor or How to Make Your Expert Advisor More Profitable

There is always a debate about the advisability of using automated trading strategies and advisors in the Forex market.
You've probably also come across statements like, "All advisors eventually drain your deposit!" Do you think this is just another rant from people obsessed with manual trading?

No, in fact, any advisor without exception, if you don’t interfere with its work, will sooner or later drain your deposit.

But at the same time, let's face it and ask ourselves a very simple question: do you know an example of at least one manual strategieswhich, without any changes, could generate profit on a permanent basis?

You've likely never encountered such strategies, and neither has our team. What's the point of abandoning expert advisor trading if it's a manual strategy, and the trading expert will sooner or later lose your deposit if you don't intervene and make any changes to its logic? The answer is obvious: all tools, without exception, can be used on the market, but in order to make them reliable and maintain high efficiency, optimization is necessary.

In this article, you'll learn the main reasons why your advisor's performance is deteriorating, as well as how to make your advisor more profitable than it currently is.

Reasons why an advisor trades with varying success. Solution

1) The market movement phase has changed

It's no secret that the market moves in three directions: downward, upward, and horizontal. Therefore, an asset's movement can be divided into two phases: trending (when the market moves either up or down) and flat (when the price moves sideways).

Any advisor, one way or another, is focused on a specific type of price movement, so if at one point trend movements begin to prevail over flat movements, or vice versa, the expert advisor begins to gradually drain the account.

To solve this problem, you must either change the trading asset and try to find more acceptable conditions, or deeply optimize the key variables that determine the entry point.

2) Market movements have become wider or narrower than usual

Any trading asset that you take always moves in only three directions, namely either up, down, or hangs practically in place (horizontal movement).

However, a striking feature of each currency pair is the width of certain movements, as well as the prevailing market conditions.


For example, both EURUSD and USDJPY may prevail flat, however, the width of the flat wave for the euro will be 15 points, while for the yen it will be 35.

Therefore, if the volatility of the selected asset changes dramatically, you will constantly be hit by stop orders, or the price will not reach profit. To solve this problem, you only need to optimize three key parameters: the stop order value in points, the profit value, and the trailing value.

3) The relationship between trading session and profitability

You've probably noticed that different currency pairs exhibit completely different activity during certain trading sessions.

This process occurs because in different parts of the world, the trading process for interested traders occurs at different times of day. Consequently, an asset may experience intense price movement at certain times, while at other times it may remain in a constant sideways trend.

If you notice that the advisor is making many false trades in the evenings or mornings, it's likely that the advisor's trading strategy is linked to trading at a certain time of day or on certain days.

Solving this problem is quite simple: you need to analyze the transactions and identify at what time or on what day the expert produces the largest number of false transactions.

In order not to shovel a bunch of transactions on your own, a special program MaxProfit will help you, or if you trade with Amarkets It is enough to use the "Trade Analyzer" service.

Once you find this pattern, it is enough to turn off your robot during ineffective trading times.

4) Trading on the news

News or fundamental data directly impact the effectiveness of an advisor's trading, as they can cause the market to behave erratically, with the price subject to violent surges and pullbacks that can typically hit a stop loss.

To increase the efficiency of your advisor, especially if it is based on technical analysis, simply disable the robot during the release of key statistics.

5) Incorrectly selected asset

As we have already noted, each trading asset, despite the general wave-like structure of price movement, has its own specific characteristics, ranging from swaps and spreads to volatility and liquidity.

If the trading asset was initially selected without taking into account its features, the advisor may lose money due to a banal high spread or insufficient volatility.

Solving this problem is quite simple: it is necessary to conduct testing on other trading assets or conduct deep optimization of the basic parameters.

6) Inadequate money management

The most common mistake traders make when using advisors is misaligning their capital management model with their deposit size.

To improve efficiency, many traders greatly inflate their position size, which leads to excessive drawdowns or a complete loss of the deposit after a series of unsuccessful trades.

To overcome this problem it is enough to optimize your trading lot and find out its optimal value so that the drawdown is within reasonable limits, and the profit is at a decent level.

In conclusion, I'd like to point out that there aren't many reasons why an advisor's performance declines. Therefore, through simple optimization and self-analysis, they can be easily identified and eliminated, which will ultimately allow you to achieve that desired stability.