Installing an Expert Advisor

Expert Advisors(EAs) are automated trading strategies run through a trading program called Metatrader 4 (MT4.) These programs execute trades in your MT4 account based on the preset rules of the trading program. EAs are frequently called trading robots. This video will walk you through downloading and setting up an EA provided by OneStepRemoved.com.

If you have found an EA strategy that you want to use, the first step is to save it on your computer. If you are downloading an EA from a website, the first step is to click on the download link. Once you have done that, you need to save the EA in the proper folder on your computer. You will want to save the EA in the Expert Advisors folder of your MT4 application. Depending on which MT4 application you are using, you can find it using the following tree.

-> My Computer
-> Local Disk (C:)
-> Program Files
-> FXDD – Metatrader 4
-> Expert Advisors

The folder second from the bottom will depend on the brokers version of MT4 that you are using, FXDD is just used as a placeholder name here. You will be given the opportunity to chose the file name under which to save the EA, in this example we will use the name 2550. If you download your EA will MT4 is open, you will want to restart MT4. Restarting MT4 refreshes the list of EAs and custom indicators displayed.

Once you have refreshed the list of Indicators, pull a chart open. You can do that by clicking file, new chart; you can pick any pair and time frame for this exercise. Than you need to pull up your list of EAs. There should be a window on the left called "Navigator." If you don't see this window, click "View" on the top of the screen and click "Navigator" this will reload your navigator tab.

To launch an EA from the "Navigator tab," left click on the name of the EA and simply drag it on top of the chart you wish to run the EA through. A window will pop up after this, with two available tabs to toggle through. In this case, the only important box that needs to be checked is under the "Common" tab. The box entitled "Allow Live Trading" needs to be checked in order for this EA to function properly. The remaining options under the "Common" tab and under the "Inputs" tab are important, but are beyond the scope of this video.

Once you have pulled the EA onto the chart, you want to check the top right hand corner of the chart. You will either see a happy face, an unhappy face, or an X. You want to see a happy face, this means that your EA is working properly and will execute a trade the next time the programming instructs it to. If you see an X, that simply means you need to turn on EAs in your MT4. This is easy to do, there is a tab on the top left corner of the screen called "Expert Advisors." You simply need to click on this tab to toggle on all EAs. Once you have done this, the icon on the tab should change fro a red circle to a green triangle.

If you see an unhappy face, this means that you did not toggle "Allow Live Trading" when you were setting up the EA. To fix this, simply right click on the chart and choose "Expert Advisors," than "Properties." Once this is done, simply click on the common tab and chose "Allow Live Trading." Once this has been fixed, your EA should run through the backtest properly. Our next video will discuss analyzing the results of a MT4 backtest.