EAs & auto trading

Every EA published here closes its backtest with a profit factor above 1 — and ten of the fourteen still had a losing calendar year. Here is what the full closed-trade record says about when an EA makes money and what you have to sit through to collect it.

Comparing an EA against discretionary trading usually turns into an argument about judgement. Replaying 9,702 published trades under the stop rules a human would actually use gives a sharper answer: switching off after three losses in a row would have cost 93% of the catalogue's result.

Every listing on this site recommends a 10,000 minimum and 0.1 lots — for EAs whose worst recorded drawdown ranges from 0.67% to 26.5% of that deposit. One number cannot be right for a 40-fold spread. Here is how to size from the record instead, and the four numbers that decide when you switch an EA off.

A free EA costs nothing to download and full price to run untested. In our own free template gallery, 40 of the 53 measured designs are labelled recommended, all 53 are flagged weak by that same record, and none of them clears the pass bar the Builder prints for your builds. Here is the order to check things in, and how the free EAs here are funded.