I have manually traded stocks and commodities - with some success over a period of 6 months, turning £3000.00 into >£30,000. Took out 50% and lost the rest by breaking my trading rules on one single gold bet!!!
3 years later, I have started again with forex. Manual trading is real - real hard, real emotional, and real time consuming. EA trading still means taking decisions on your rules - choose an EA that fits your rules, modify one that is close, or accept a best fit. You still take responsibility for demoing = 'papertrading' but at least if you can trade without being glued to the screen, as an EA lets you, you have less temptation to overtrade, break your rules etc. But it's still real - just real hard, not real emotional or real time consuming.
If someone else's free EA works for you and you have a problem with that - send them half the profits - I have not written an EA and if I contribute I will not want paying - but the cold facts are - if the cash is real then it's real.
Andy
3 years later, I have started again with forex. Manual trading is real - real hard, real emotional, and real time consuming. EA trading still means taking decisions on your rules - choose an EA that fits your rules, modify one that is close, or accept a best fit. You still take responsibility for demoing = 'papertrading' but at least if you can trade without being glued to the screen, as an EA lets you, you have less temptation to overtrade, break your rules etc. But it's still real - just real hard, not real emotional or real time consuming.
If someone else's free EA works for you and you have a problem with that - send them half the profits - I have not written an EA and if I contribute I will not want paying - but the cold facts are - if the cash is real then it's real.
Andy
Quoting sm31DislikedYep. It's all about the cash-sh-sh-sh. ;-) I'll bet that 5% success rate among real life traders jumps to about 90% among the demo crowd. Funny how they're playing by the exact same rules, but without the money.
As long as a trader has the ability to stop/start an EA, cut profitable trades early (a typical newbie mistake), and generally interfere with the system, then it is definitely real trading... IMO of course.Ignored
Andy