Forex Robots and Trading Signal Software: Who has the Holy Grail?

We do not know what use was made of the Holy Grail, if it had ever existed. Nowadays, perhaps some forex robots and trading signal software hold the key! However, if the Knights of the Round Table derived any advantage from any association with that legendary item, history doesn’t provide a lot of details on the nature of the benefits. It seems the bards and the poets of the Medieval era were the greatest beneficiaries of the Grail legend, selling their tales at the courts and ensuring a full stomach in the process, if not more. The tradition is alive even today, with “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, the “Da Vinci Code” all reaping their share of the profits from the propagation of this ancient, dubious, yet highly entertaining legend.To get more news about Forex Robots Trading, you can visit wikifx.com official website.

The currency trading field has its own share of these bards and poets, each telling the same story from a different angle, embellishing it with new and exciting details on the unimaginable benefits, the unparalleled gains that one can achieve once he is in possession of the Holy Grail, the Forex Code, the Universal Secret of Trading, the Best Automated System in History. Times change however, and the blood of Christ no longer has the same powerful impact on the minds of believers as it had in the past. Nowadays, the scientifically minded, but gullible individual will seek the Holy Grail in some kind of mathematical formula, a numerical trick, some technical tool that will reveal the secrets of profitable trading to the entire universe.

Forex Robots
What is a forex robot? This is a kind of program developed by some high-school educated individual, which purports to be able to eliminate the human factor from trading entirely. Since programs, API’s, do not respond emotionally to market developments, we’re told that they possess a clear advantage over the human trader who is constrained by his natural disposition to shout, weep, laugh at sharp turns in the market. In this era of automation, the proponents of automated trading propose that we are fools to draw charts manually and to analyze every twist and turn of the market with eyes glued to the screen, especially when the computer can be programmed to do all these in our place and to do so with an efficiency that is impossible to match for a human being. Since everyone emphasizes the importance of discipline during trading decisions, of the crucial role of solid rules which are followed with punctuality and consistency, the creators of these programs submit that there is no better choice than leaving all the practical aspects of this task to an automated program.

In order to establish the validity of their claims and to demonstrate the purported prowess of the robot, the sellers of these curiosities will couple their sales letters with a large record of back testing data that shows the irrefutable power of automated trading – in hindsight. Very large profits with little drawdown, consistent gains over many trades all convince inexperienced traders that the Holy Grail is within reach finally. If only it were possible that Percival and Lady Guinevere were here, how merry everyone would be! But we will have to contend ourselves with the tremendous profits we’ll make while utilizing our new robot, which we bought for about $500.

But will we really make those great profits or are we just helping to fill the stomach of the bard for the entertainment value? What does a forex robot or an automated trading program really do? It must first establish some rules for the trade which will be in the form of some technical indicators or price patterns as evaluated by the computer. Then it must apply these rules for profiting from market events, as signals are generated throughout the trading day, and into the future. What does the back testing prove? If the rules were applied in the past, the program would have registered profits. What must the program do? It must make profits for us in the future because historical profits may make us smile, but they will not add a penny in our pockets – unless we’re selling a forex robot.

Now, if the program established potential success in the past, why can’t we expect the same results to be repeated in the future? Since the charts look very similar on the whole, why can’t we expect those back testing results to be transformed to future profits? There’s this little disclaimer at the bottom of every legitimate forex broker’s webpage, which states that past performance does not guarantee future results. What does that mean? It means that financial markets are chaotic processes in which the prevailing rules change all the time according to dynamics which are not well understood as yet. In other words, the technical rules that are valid today will not be valid tomorrow. The technical methods that generate profits today will not do so in the future, because the mathematical processes that define the price action change all the time. Most definitely, there’s no single mathematical process or formula that can be applied to generate consistent profits in the market. All that the back testing results prove is that at some point in the past, there were technical methods the use of which could be profitable for the trader. But we want to know what the successful technical method will be tomorrow, not two days ago, as we don’t own a time machine that will deliver us back in time to trade the markets with the hindsight we possess.

And if you have any difficulty in accepting the above statement, consider your own experiences in the forex market: How many times have you seen that a technical indicator, a trading strategy, a combination of technical tools that worked five minutes ago, is unsuccessful just a short while later? Now wouldn’t you laugh at yourself if you had taken the combination that had worked five minutes ago and declared it to be a universally valid tool for all time? We know for sure that regardless of how successful our technical configuration was five minutes ago, it will fail regularly in the future because of the random nature of price movements.