Advertisements online frequently offer traders profitable trading robots. According to sellers, anyone who buys such a robot will double their deposit in just one month. The proof is usually a beautiful strategy tester report from MetaTrader. Let’s discuss whether these promises are trustworthy and what traders should actually spend their money on.
Fantastic Profits
Often, these robots are offered in a compiled format for MetaTrader, without the source code, so traders have no way to influence the robot’s trading. The price for such a “pig in a poke” can reach $500 or even more. Let’s see how much a trader could actually earn by buying such a robot and running it on live markets.
Suppose the initial deposit is $500 with a leverage of 1:100. The purchased robot doubles the amount in a month, then doubles it again the next month, and after six months the deposit reaches $2000! After six months, the trader would have $32,000. It’s easy to calculate that after a year, the deposit would grow to $2,048,000. Not bad, right?
Even if the robot only delivers half the promised profit (i.e., 50% per month instead of 100%), after a year the $500 deposit would grow to $64,000! That’s a huge sum. And what if you start with $5,000 or $10,000? The numbers become dizzying.
There’s No Profitable Robot—Only Scammers
The question arises: why would anyone sell such a profitable robot for just $500? Why doesn’t the seller use it themselves?
The answer is simple: there is no such profitable robot, only scammers who skillfully present attractive backtesting reports from MetaTrader to inexperienced traders. The seller’s profit comes from selling the robot, not from trading. It’s highly likely that the seller has no real trading experience and simply took any suitable robot, adjusted it to fit historical data, created a beautiful report, and now sells this “holy grail” to traders who can’t spot the scam.
Never buy such robots! In these cases, you’re always buying a backtesting report, not a robot that will actually make money in the future. For any complaints, you’ll always get the answer that the market has changed, everything is different now, and so on…
More realistic are test results showing 100% profit per year. Imagine the robot really doubles your deposit every year. Investing $10,000 now, you’d become a millionaire in seven years. How much would such a trading system be worth? And why would anyone sell it if they could turn $10,000 (the price of a domestic car) into millions? The answer is obvious: a system sold to traders cannot consistently deliver such profits. The seller knows this and tries to make as much money as possible from sales during the robot’s peak performance.
Where Traders Should Spend Their Money
It makes sense for a trader to buy a robot whose performance they can observe on a demo account, or even better, on a live account. It’s easy for the seller to do this: just open an account, run the robot, and publicly display its statistics. Any trader can verify its effectiveness and then buy it. This is the most honest way to sell.
Even if the purchased robot doesn’t deliver the promised profit, it won’t be due to seller fraud (provided the purchased robot makes the same trades as the one on the seller’s demo account, which remains there after the sale to attract new buyers). Of course, the price will likely be high. Why? Because it’s not expensive. Compare the cost of a small factory producing something with the profit it generates in a year. How is a robot different from that factory? Buying a ready-made robot is like buying a ready and fine-tuned business that brings profit. And such businesses are expensive.
Traders should also consider buying original indicators or scripts that simplify trading. In this case, no profit is promised, but traders get additional tools for the Forex market.
Another option is to order custom robots from MQL programmers based on your own trading system. This automation simplifies routine tasks and helps quickly test or adjust your strategy to market conditions. Whether the robot brings profit depends on the system the trader built into it.
Traders should also buy literature if it seems useful. Even if the book turns out to be mostly useless, some ideas or thoughts might still be interesting and helpful for trading.
There’s only one thing that makes no sense for a trader—buying a ready-made robot that shows profit in MetaTrader’s historical backtester, no matter how beautiful the report looks.
The next time someone offers you a ready-made robot, be smarter and ask yourself: why are they trying to sell you a hen that lays golden eggs?
