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Beware of Brokers Lagging Your Expert Advisors

If you are using Expert Advisors on the MT4 platform, beware that some brokers are messing with the order execution. I’m using several accounts across multiple brokers, and with some of them I’m seeing some really weird behavior.

Imagine that your MT4 terminal us fully connected to your broker, the quotes are coming in constantly, your EA tries to place a trade but gets a “no connection” error from the MT4 terminal. How the heck is that even possible? I have seen a number of other errors as well, however the “no connection” is the most frequent.
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Do Profitable Expert Advisors Exist?

If you look around the web you can find more Expert Advisors than traders. There are so many broke wannabe traders throwing crappy EA’s together to make some easy money. The problem is they are always backtested and never tried in a live market, which means the result is very questionable at best.

Besides not being able to trust the results, they very often don’t work at all in a live market, and if they do actually hit a winning trade it’s not consistent. I have been in the game for many years, and I have never seen an EA that returned consistent profits. I have seen a few that actually worked pretty well for a few weeks, or in some rare cases even a few months, but none that continue to work.

I have no doubt that profitable Expert Advisors exist, however they are not available for purchase, and if they are it’s with a hefty price-tag. Think about it, if you had developed an EA that actually worked, steadily increasing your account balance every month, would you even consider selling it? I surely wouldn’t.

My advice is to stop chasing crappy EA’s that don’t work, and instead learn how to trade! It takes time and effort, and even a few margin calls, but you will get there if you are consistent.

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Risk Management with MetaTrader 4

Did you know that most traders don’t use proper risk management at all, and this is the main reason their account gets creamed fairly quickly?

So many traders are opening orders purely based on lotsize, without taking into consideration how much risk that lotsize actually is. If you place a 1 lot trade on an account, depending on the SL and your account size, that 1 lot equals a certain risk percentage. However, if that trade is a loser and you use the same lotsize and SL for the next order, the risk percentage for the new order will be greater. If you continue doing this through a number of losing trades, you suddenly have a big hole in your trading account.

The bottom line is that you should always know exactly what you are risking per trade, anything else is financial suicide. Back in the day, traders would have to manually calculate their risk per trade, which is quite time consuming, this is also why so few traders do it. The industry standard MT4 trade manager from Pecunia Systems has built-in risk calculation with 1-click execution, so you simply select the desired risk percentage and click buy or sell, and FX Synergy instantly and automatically calculated the exact lotsize to use on the trade. Extremely useful, and very handy for proper risk management.

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MT4 Account Connection Limit

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have probably heard about the recent MT4 limits imposed by MetaQuotes. The first to experience this was myfxbook, who started having issues connecting to user accounts a few weeks ago. With the recent MT4 update, MetaQuotes have imposed a limit on how many accounts a single IP address can connect to, which obviously is a huge issue for myfxbook as they are connecting to thousands of accounts from a small range of IPs.

This limitation affects all MT4 service providers connecting to a large number of accounts, especially signal providers, which is the main reason MetaQuotes have imposed this limit on account connections per IP. MetaQuotes are currently rolling out their own MT4 and MT5 signal service platform, so obviously they don’t want anyone competing with them. As long as you are only connecting to a few accounts per IP address there shouldn’t be any issues.

Do I think they are playing fair? Heck no! The primary reason for the success of the MT4 platform is due to 3rd-party developers, and now they are trying to screw them all. Nice going MetaQuotes!