When it comes to trading bots and expert advisors, there are a couple paths that you can choose. You can either use a pre-built expert advisor which is what most traders use or you can use an EA generator platform and develop your own.
There is another way that is kind of similar to building a custom EA, and that is to customize an expert advisor or trading bot.
In this article, we will focus on both of these methods and give you a general idea of how you can customize a trading bot on MT4 and MT5 to have your own trading strategy.
What Are Trading Bots and How Can EA Generator Platforms Help?
The world of trading bots can be as diverse as the financial world itself. There are so many different types of trading bots for so many different types of trading platforms, market conditions, strategies, etc.
The trading robots that are used on MetaTrader 4 and 5 are called expert advisors or EAs. Expert advisors are like software that are developed for MT4 and MT5 and you can install them on these platforms to automate the trading process.
The amount of method of automation will ultimately depend on the type of expert advisor that you are using. When you are choosing your expert advisor, there are so many factors that you need to keep in mind to yield the type of automation that you are looking for.
This is where the matter of customization becomes important.
There are basically two ways that you can obtain this customization, although they are entirely different. But we will talk about both of them.
Firstly, you can use pre-built expert advisors and then customize them in the process of configuration. Of course, this customization will be completely limited to how much the pre-built expert advisor allows traders to configure it. But there are still those expert advisors that give a lot of space to traders for configuration.
Secondly, there are platforms that allow you to fully build your own custom expert advisor. These platforms are known as EA generator’s. The way they work is that they provide you with the interface to build your expert advisor piece by piece. They work in different ways. Some of them are quite visual to make it easy for traders. Some of them work through logic boxes, where you would pick and choose boxes to slowly build up the final version of your expert advisor.
Whichever one of these methods you choose for obtaining customizing trading bot on MT4 and MT5, we will give you a good starting point and the know-how in the following sections.
Why Choose MT4 and MT5 for Your Trading Bots?
When it comes to customization, platforms that allow for the development of custom expert advisors are again more popular than other custom trading robot platforms. This is closely tied to the trading platforms MT4 and MT5 themselves and what they can do for traders:
- Support for Custom and Generated EAs: they are quite flexible and adaptable when it comes to using custom generated expert advisors on them.
- Powerful Backtesting: both of these platforms have what is known as the Strategy Tester when you can easily backtest the expert adviser you have customized.
- Wide Range of Built-In Tools: both the MT4 and the MT5 have an extensive array of built-in tools, including technical indicators, charting tools, risk management tools, etc. to help you get the best of your trading experience.
- Large Community and Resources: because these two platforms are the most popular trading platforms, they have an enormous community of users with whom you can share and exchange ideas with custom expert advisors.
How Traders Can Use EA Generator Platforms to Create and Customize Bots
- Choose an EA Generator Platform
- Design You Strategy
- Configure Risk Management
- Create the EA
- Backtest Thoroughly
- Run on a Demo Account First
- Deploy Live with Caution
The very first step is to pick the right EA generator platform. Look for factors such as its compatibility with the trading platform MT4 or MT5. Make sure how user friendly and easy to use the platform is.
The most important step in customizing your own trading bots on MT4 and MT5 is to choose the trading strategy. So make sure to choose the trading strategy offered by the platform that is most compatible with your trading aims and trading conditions.
Aside from the trading strategy itself which forms the foundation of the expert advisor, risk management is the second most important basis of your custom expert advisor. So choose the factors related to risk management carefully, including orders like stop loss, defining drawdown, position size, etc.
After you have chosen the various features and aspects of your custom expert advisors, you can create it to begin the testing process.
The first testing process is to backtest the expert advisor thoroughly. Make sure to use extensive and reliable historical data to backtest your expert advisor and make sure of its performance. Adjust it wherever needed according to the backtest report.
The second part of the testing process which is also known as forward testing is to run your expert advisor through a demo account first and test it with real market data before using it on a real account.
Finally, you can take your custom expert advisor to the market, but make sure to start with a small amount and build up slowly as you build trust in your custom expert advisor.