An Expert Advisor, or EA, is a program that runs inside MetaTrader 4 or MetaTrader 5 and can place trades on the account that terminal is logged in to.
Your money stays with your broker
An EA doesn't hold your funds. It sends orders through your own terminal to your own broker account, and you keep control of deposits and withdrawals.
What an EA needs to run
- A running terminal. If MetaTrader is closed or your PC sleeps, the EA isn't running and can miss trades. Many traders use a VPS for this reason.
- Algo Trading switched on. MetaTrader has a toolbar button for it. If it's off, nothing gets placed.
- The right symbol name. Brokers name instruments differently, so gold might be
XAUUSD,XAUUSD.morGOLD. - Enough margin. Orders are refused if the account can't support the size.
Signal-following EAs
Some EAs make their own decisions on your chart. Others, like the LogicFlux EA, follow a strategy running elsewhere: the strategy produces a signal, and the EA receives it and places the trade on your account with your risk settings.
What you stay in charge of
You choose how much to risk and which account it runs on, and you can stop it whenever you want. No EA removes the risk of trading, and losses are a normal part of every strategy.
Test on demo first
Run any EA on a demo account until you've seen it open and close trades, and until you understand how it reacts when a trade goes against you. Compare what it did with what you expected.
Next steps
Read the setup answers in our FAQ, then look at the live strategies and how each has performed.