Learning to trade as you have stated many times is a years-long journey. Learning to write EA's is also a journey to develop a separate and additional skill. Whether using EA's is useful for any given trader is up to them. Personally given the way I trade I think it has many benefits, and so I think it is worth the effort to learn.
I am fortunate I have some very limited prgramming experience from my university. But to be totally honest if I was faced with having to learn to program actual MT4 code (or code for any other platform like cTrader) I think that would be too high a barrier and I would either stick to trading manually or once I could justify the spend from profits then pay someone to write the code I need.
Fortunately for me I learned about the EA Labs platform that Tradeview are promoting - it has lowered the barrier to writing EA code sufficiently that I am able to take this path on - because instead of writing lines of code, the platform provides a set of visual logic blocks that I can simply drag and drop from a menu, then compile into actual code, and then test & run.
If you've seen MT4 code then you know what it looks like. The EA Labs code looks like the following (very simple) example describing a bullish engulfing bar:
As you can see, its just a bunch of IF-DO logic blocks. That's not to say its easy to learn to program using this platform, I am saying that it makes it much easier than learning MT4 coding. Its also not to say that all EAs using this platform are as simple as the example shown - I am still a newbie and I have developed some EA's that are far more complex than the example shown. It has still taken me about 3-4 months of solid effort to become proficient with this software.
The beauty of this platform is that far more focus can be dedicated towards getting the EA logic right than worrying about and de-bugging MT4 code syntax errors. But the logic is still enough of a challenge. Take that ForexSignals scalping strategy that I posted about this week - I have spent some time on it and got it running on the buy side as per the rules in the video. But an EA is brutal in highlighting variations on simple rules (because we visually don't pick them up because of our biases, but the EA has no bias so it trades the conditions exactly as stated). For example that scalping rule says for a buy the H1 8EMA must be > than the 21EMA and the price bars must be above the 8EMA, but there are plenty of times where there is only 1 or 2 bars in that condition so then you need to add a rule about how many H1 bars must be above the 8EMA, and there are many examples like that so what starts as a simple concept can become quite a complex EA.
This highlights the trade-off between manual and auto/mechanical trading. The strength of manual trading is that we humans can visually process lots of complex information and distill simple patterns that are there. The weakness is that we are humans. Conversely computers/EAs can only identify what we describe to them in very explicit instructions. But their strength is they will follow those instructions 100%. And once developed they can do a lot of the grunt work we would otherwise have to continue to do manually, so I think its an investment that can generate returns in both profits and time (remembering that time is money anyway), and the above reasons are why I believe for me its the way to go.
