Quick update from me on my Forex journey - combination of being very busy with work and having broker issues has seen slow progress the last fortnight, but my research and understanding of EAs has increased probably 10 fold in the last week lol, as a result of a lot of reading/articles/playing around with back testing - so I'm keen to sink my teeth into back testing the more promising EAs on market until I find one that I think looks promising, even if the returns are only modest (my goal is to learn not gain anyway). I reckon this is the best way to go for me, as once I become very intimate and 'master' the back testing and EA landscape within MT4 and MT5, I can then concern myself with the development of my own EAs once the 'second half' of the EA journey is already known to me - hopefully that informs better EAs anyway when I go to write them, who knows!
The other area that has caught my interest is signals being run by EAs (not by humans, I see no value there). Often you can find a signal provider who is providing a signal off an EA they are also selling on the market place, so it's interesting to me as I wonder if those 'EA + Signal' combos have a higher probability of being a legitimate algo, and not simply an EA that has been modified or curve fitting just to show really good gains, but in reality is rubbish - if an EA is confident enough to run a live signal, then this in effect is both ticking the EA screening box, as well as the 'run it on a demo' box (as I consider the MQL signal provider criteria to be reasonable - so the returns and graphs displayed on a signal are 'honest' by comparison to the EA graphs in market place. My working theory anyway - I have subscribed to one signal in a split account. Part of me feels like Signals are 'lazy' and I will not learn from them, so they're not overly attractive to me in the long run, but so far as using them to fast track the 'trial' of EAs, I'm hopeful it proves to be a good strategy, and perhaps if it makes some profit in the mean time then I can't really complain.
