This page is obsolete and no longer maintained.

Upon a suggestion made by Dewey in a comment, I decided to start this list because many of my readers are requesting reviews and more often then not I won’t review the EAs suggested and I always feel the need to reply with a reason for that. So, instead of repeating the same information over and over in mail replies, I will just list here EAs that I will not review, together with the reason, in no particular order. This list is by no means complete – I’m sure I’ve forgotten many EAs, but I will update it as I run into more stuff that I decide to pass.

This list is not set in stone. It can happen that I’m wrong and I’m pretty sure it will happen. I might misjudge an EA for whatever reason and I would surely like to be given a chance to revise my statement when it’s necessary. However, unless you have a very good reason for me to reconsider my opinion in regards to an EA on this list please do not contact me about it.

EA Shark 6.0

The ex4 of the EA contains hundreds of hardcoded dates during which trade is disabled. If these days are removed, its backtest is a disaster. Someone asked the author on a forum and their answer was:

Yes. Client version gets all data from our server and don’t includes the data libraries. During forward trading it works like this: The server collect and analyzes all data in real time. If the conditions are not clear or going to change trading will be disabled till enough data are collected for automated parameter and logic adjustment. Historical dates where such situation appeared are hard coded in the front file (ex4) from the client version to speed up the process of testing on the client terminal. When the data would be requested and analyzed in simulated real time mode mostly clients wouldn’t be able to run tester because of high technical requirements. And those who uses very strong machines would need to be very patient as testing would need really long time.

This would be of course not acceptable and from this reason these days are hard coded in the ex4 file. There is nothing to hide or wrong with or do you really think that we would “hide” something in an ex4 file which can be decompiled from everybody who own a decompiling script what costs on Russian forums 10 USD?

After having that quoted to me by a reader, I decided to take a peek into the DLL to see if it was actually possible for the server to disable trading and to the best of my ability I haven’t discovered anything like that, so my honest opinion is that the paragraph quoted above is just creative bullshit.

All the EA does is check the license via a mysql connection. The only queries it performs are:

SELECT * FROM Relations WHERE USER='%s' and ADVISOR='%s'

and

SELECT ADVISOR,VERSION,UPDATE_DATE,COMMENTS FROM Build WHERE ADVISOR='%s'

Forex Crescendo

Although I kind of like this one and I believe it may be possible to run it safely, I’ve been informed by the author that it isn’t possible to properly backtest it due to the fact that the two pairs interact with each other in forward testing, making any backtest pointless.

I backtested it nonetheless and the results weren’t particularly beautiful in years prior to 2007, but it’s definitely not your typical crash-the-account grid EA.

Breakout Genius

Its backtest performance is not up to par. Prior to mid-2009, it’s constantly losing.

Leo Trader

This one is basically just a trade copier so it can’t be backtested. On top of that, it strongly smells like bullshit to me. You know what they say about things that look too good to be true.

Megadroid

Pretty much everyone heard about this one and whoever would’ve bought it, did so already. While writing a review of it might be interesting seeing that some people still claim to be making money with it, I’m sorry but I am not willing to dedicate my time to relics because each review takes a lot of my time and my schedule is extremely busy as of late. I have a day job so the time I dedicate to this site is limited.

Pipsminer

Most forward test statements that I can find are either unprofitable or have been suffering very serious drawdowns.

Primeval

Despite the drawdowns it sometimes exhibits, I would’ve been interested in reviewing this one. However, the developer seems to think that I’m out to eat his children and that I will crack the EA and post it on forums. Long story short, I asked for a review copy and I was refused. Of course I already have the EA, but I’m not going to bother reviewing it without becoming an affiliate. On top of that, I’ve been reading various forums and as it seems, the developer is a very rude and bickery person and I’m better off not getting associated with such individuals.

Cable Run

Too risky in my opinion. Averages down without a limit, resulting in 20+ open trades sometimes. Will hit stopout sooner or later, depending on the account balance and lot size.

FX-Combo EA

Not to be confused with Forex Combo System.

Given the fact that the home page of the EA only features 2010 backtests and that the forward test listed on the site has been stopped shortly after it was started (it only has 6 trades), I tend to think this is just a scam. I contacted the author to clear it up but I received no answer.

Retracer

Looks like a good robot but it is no longer being sold.

ZeusFX (the $599 one)

This one is not only overpriced, but it has an interesting curve fitting in it applied to lot sizing. The position sizes are configured in such a way so that the most profitable periods have bigger lot sizes while the dangerous periods trade way smaller lots. If the lot size curve fitting is removed, the EA hits a margin call in backtesting. On top of that, its website looks abandoned, there’s been no update since launch.

SilverEA

This one is in fact a copy of Forex Megabot that runs on 2 additional pairs. Not only does it have almost the same manual (with a small change here and there) but it also uses the same authentication method and one of the external parameters is named “g_slippage_228”. Sloppy.

A while after I posted the above, the EA authentication & protection was changed and the g_slippage_228 parameter got renamed. Also, it looks like the EA itself suffered some changes and seems to trade visibly different not. Since Forex Megabot is no longer sold & supported and SilverEA seems to be about the same thing with some slight changes, I am adding this to the EA Top for reference.

FX Solution EA

The backtests posted by the author on forums (those on the website are just really small images, not backtests) seem to indicate that it is overoptimized (if not curve fit) for 2008-2010. An 11 year backtest with 0.1 lotsize on a 5k start balance resulted in a maximal drawdown of ~70% when reported to the initial balance. Some users report good results in forward tests and I truly hope that it will keep up, but personally I would not trust it with a live account so I’m not going to write an article about it. I can’t help but wonder what happened to the two demo accounts on the vendor’s myfxbook page that were stopped a while ago. On top of that, it doesn’t even seem to have an affiliate system.

Smart scalper

The vendor posts 1 month worth of backtests on the product homepage, no forward test, asks $349 for it and has the audacity to claim that the product has free updates for an year. I mean, it’s obviously a scam, why the hell not offer lifetime updates? Paypal payment and no refund policy just screams “scam” at me.

Tortoise EA

A martingale crap from the same vendor as Smart Scalper. Funny quote from the product info page: “The Risk/Reward Ratio equals to 1 witch makes the system so safe.” – well, if there must be witchery, I can’t really argue with that, can I? The author is very lucky we’re not living in the fourteenth century, although in my opinion he should be burned anyway. This one also advertises “free updates for an year” and its backtests are 4 times longer than those of Smart Scalper – in all likelihood, the author was unable to produce a backtest longer than that without crashing the account. What I find extremely funny is that the vendor is selling a martingale EA and then, on the page of the other product they’re selling, we can read “No Martingale. So you won’t be worry about the growing of the loss trades.”

Steinitz Fractal Pterodactyl

No backtest, no forward test, no refunds, high price. What does that tell you?

And of course, you can only pay by Paypal, wire or Western Union, because well, Clickbank and Plimus might eventually let the customer have his refund…

The same applies to about all forexrobottrader.com EAs. If you take a look at Fractal Breakout, it even has fake statements. The EA was launched in 2009 and there are statements “from the customers” dated 2008 plus half of the statements are using stop/limit orders and the other half aren’t. Of course, there’s no such thing as a live account for that one either, probably meaning that it’s just another account crasher.

Xtreme Pip Poacher

This is in fact just Robovore renamed and its performance is extremely bad, take a look at the FPA Robovore or XPP statements.

Any arbitrage EA

I’m never going to review such an EA. Not only can’t they be backtested, but it’s my firm opinion that they can’t be used live successfully. Even if someone finds a broker where it actually works, they will soon either get an email asking them to cease doing it or otherwise just get their account closed due to a contract breach, as most brokers have a clause against arbitrage nowadays, be it a time limit or a pip limit.

I mean, come on, do you truly think the brokers are stupid? When you’re successfully performing arbitrage you’re literally stealing from them, unless it’s an NDD/STP broker in which case your arbitrage attempt is probably going to get killed by slippage and requotes. Do you think the brokers are fine with you stealing from them? In a world where high frequency trading is not an uncommon occurrence, do you actually believe you can perform arbitrage from some VPS with a software that has a price featuring a whole three digits?

I don’t care if you or anyone else actually managed to use arbitrage live once in a blue moon, I simply won’t recommend such an EA to anyone, it’s just a waste of time and definitely not something that one would want to use in the long run.

MetaPro FxCore Scalper

This one was taken off the no review list for a while at the insistence of a few readers while I looked some more into it. Long story short, I exchanged a few mails with the developer, I asked for a review copy which I didn’t get so I proceeded to acquire it myself. I ran some backtests with all 4 set files included and the results were very poor, very much like the performance exhibited in the forward test on the FPA.

Enigma G12

Quantumdollars dot com looks like the work of a scam artist. They are publishing a fake statement on their site and they got caught red handed a forum, having modified some trade outcomes in it while they forgot to modify the entry and exit prices & times. Their reply was that their perl script made an error while it was deleting limit orders – I mean, come on, that’s total bullshit, why would anyone need to remove the limit orders in a plain statement? Quite a far fetched scenario. As some kind of an apology, they proceeded to give a few copies for free, probably hoping that the users might get a few profitable trades and then brag about them which might end in some sales. By the way, if you see outdated statements published on EA sites, now you know the reason.

GPS Forex Robot

It looks like the GPS part of this EA is working perfectly. The only problem is that the destination it’s set to reach is 0 on your account balance. It crashed quite a few accounts already and it’s definitely not going to stop here.

Euro Smarter

While it might turn out to be profitable, it uses grid elements and it doesn’t have a limit to the amount of orders that it can open so I consider it too risky.

4XMoJo

As Dewey pointed out in a comment below, it only has a backtest for 2004. Why would anyone care how would an Asian session scalper perform in 2004? Why would the vendor publish the results for 2004 and no results for recent years unless they wanted to mislead the potential buyer? Given its high price ($499) and its lack of a forward test, it strongly smells like some kind of a scam to me.

Roboteer

If I were the vendor, I wouldn’t have the nerve to leave the sales page up with such a bad forward test. At the time of this writing, it has a steadily decreasing balance curve, having lost over 20% of the account. Not even worth the time to backtest.

Tasukigap

Rhymes with “Martingale grid crap” and will happily crash your account sooner or later.

Gap Magic

Comes from the same author as Robominer, which is a known account crasher. It uses a very wide stop loss and employs grid trading, so I will stay far away from it. At the time of this writing, the FPA test has some -600 pips floating profit on two pairs with 12 trades open, two of which have no stop loss. If the market goes against it, the EA stands to lose 2500 pips, not counting the two trades without a SL.

4X Cash Compounder

Yet another Martingale. There must be a very good reason for displaying only a few months of backtest on their website and no forward test.

Primus-Alpha

At first glance (I’ve only looked at its forward test and the history center data backtests they posted) it looks decent, but unfortunately it does not have an affiliate system so I won’t be writing a review. The only “complaints” I would have about it are that there’s no refund policy at all and that it’s a bit fishy with the FX Primus deal.

Forex Shocker

My original belief was that this one will only work on demo accounts. It usually takes profit between 1-4 pips; slippage and requotes would make short work of these profits. Nonetheless, once the developer added a forward test that seemed to be doing good, I was prompted to add it to the EA Top as well.

GenialInvest

It’s basically a signal service so I will not write a full review since it’s impossible to backtest it. However, since all its forward tests are looking quite good, I decided to add it as a forward test to the EA Top where the drawdown of its multiple concurrent positions will be thoroughly recorded. It eventually failed in a spectacular manner.

Forex Quattro

The vendor – Rita Lasker – is known for products that fail. I’d wager the vendor chose a female as his online avatar in the hope that it will sell more products. The ill repute aside, I just ran a couple of backtests on v1.3 and I didn’t like the results much. On top of that, rumor says this is a copy of a Russian EA.
Other products from the same vendor are even worse.

FxVoodoo

I ran a backtest and dismissed it really quick. It has a very poor risk/reward ratio and prior to 2010, it’s results are very, very poor – it just loses constantly. It’s obviously curve fit only for 2010.

The EA has less than 200 lines of code and of one of the first is:
if (Year() < 2010) return (0);

…and for good reason as its performance prior to 2010 is completely disastrous.

FxOriginal

While its myfxbook statement looks decent, it’s just another martingale that will probably crash sooner or later. The lots and open trades are hidden on myfxbook, but the backtest statement still has the lot sizes in it; on a balance of about 24k it opens the following lots: 0.22, 0.51, 1.19, 2.78, 6.49, 15.14. You can take a guess as to what happens if the 15.14 trade goes south on the given balance…

Guinea by ForexGenius

It’s a grid EA combined with a lot sizing scheme that smells of martingale which spells disaster. Its backtest looks awful and on top of that it has hardcoded curve fitting in an attempt to come up with a decent backtest on recent years.

CAD Trader

Seems to be a grid EA that doesn’t have a limit to its number of positions (found 20 positions open at once in their forward test), so it’s bound to crash the account sooner or later. They trust their product so much they’re using a demo account as their forward test…

Unique EA Creative Maxi

Just going to paste here what I replied to a reader asking me to look into it:
These guys used to have a bunch of EAs that were reportedly quite bad although I haven’t tested them myself. I see they now merged the various EAs into a single product and there are a few things that can be observed on the site:
– It’s made in a rush, note how it says “Eight (20)” several times and they didn’t even bother correcting it. Another example would be where it says “four timeframes” and then goes to enumerate 5 timeframes. Either they don’t care about the website at all or their math sucks badly. And a quote from a different paragraph: “a lot of-etapnuju checking” – wonder what happened here, my best guess is that Google translate failed.
– The price is extremely high and there seems to be no refunds.
– Even though they brag about good results since 1999, the backtests they are posting only span some 5 years and the site displays a drawdown figure of less than 2% with a huge font and bright colors whereas if you actually click the backtest, the drawdown was close to 70%.
– Lastly, there is no affiliate mechanism so I won’t look into the product any more than I already did; besides, it looks untrustworthy enough already.

Blessing

Martingale; it has the potential to crash accounts if not used very carefully.

Forex Overdrive

The huge stoploss (300+ pips) will clear all the earnings plus more. Everywhere I turn, I only see poor forward results for this one.

Forex Hercules

A trade copier with forward tests that seem to end sometime during May 2011. The balance charts from the statements are faked, they even got the color wrong, not to mention the fonts and grid. Their myfxbook forward test spans some two weeks and someone posted a valid question about a margin call that should have happened, question that they didn’t bother answering. It all seems highly suspicious. On top of that, recent performance on FPA is very poor as of 26.06.2010.

Happy Forex

Although the forward test results are nice, it’s a grid system that doesn’t seem to have any limit on its number of concurrent positions so I will stay away from it.

Forex Cyclone

This is an ancient scam EA (mid 2009) with a very poor backtest and similarly poor forward test results. The FPA forward test lasted 38 weeks and ended up in the negative.

Forex Steam

Backtesting it results in a very poor balance chart, both for the light version as well as for the regular, which makes me think the EA has been heavily curve fit for 2009 and left at that. I suspect the “live” statement posted on the webpage is doctored, which is why they chose mt4live for uploading it instead of myfxbook, seeing that you can fake statements there easily. There are reports that the light version is a copy of Euro Blaster, while the full version is a copy of RSI_MA_Scalper but I haven’t bothered to verify these since the EA is crap to begin with. Finally, all the forward tests I’ve been able to find for it are ranging from bad to very bad (other than their own, of course).

FAPTurbo Ichimoku

A buddy of mine ran some tick data backtests and they were different from the “official” backtests by a rather wide margin. Needless to say, they were looking much worse. I guess they might’ve used a very low spread (0?) or something like that. Anyway, I wouldn’t bother trying to go live with an EA that has a TP of 4 pips because slippage, requotes and spread widening would certainly kill its profits. Think about it, getting slipped 1 pip means 25% more to go to get to the TP.

Autocrat FX

Just another Martingale. According to what people say, it easily blows accounts in backtests and on top of that it’s full of memory leaks. I’ll be staying well away from it.

Clapan EA

A hold-and-pray EA. At the time of this writing, its FPA forward test has a floating drawdown exceeding 2000 pips and the floating negative profit threatens to exceed the current earnings.

MaxEDD

This is not even an EA. It’s an indicator. It does NOT trade on its own. As such, the account listed on the product page is completely irrelevant because there is nothing to compare against. It would’ve been useful if there was an account where MaxEDD was used and an account where it wasn’t used, but there isn’t.

Anyway, the product is some kind of an optimizer which in my opinion is quite useless. It requires you to have traded an account for 1-3 months on your broker before it produces a relevant analysis and as far as I understand it’s not even able to distinguish between several EAs in case you trade more than one on the account. If your EA produced less than some 10% profit, it just tells you to go get a new EA. There’s an upsell priced at $99 which promises to send you a list of EAs that they have experience with and that are profitable; the list contains one single name, another EA that’s on my no review list.

Back when it was being spammed into my inbox by none other than the Forex Megadroid Team – and at this point I’m guessing you guessed I guessed you might’ve guessed what might’ve been on the above-mentioned list – I was wondering what the hell it actually is and as I do with most other products that seem interesting at a first glance, I emailed the vendor and asked more details. A couple of weeks later, no reply arrived and I doubt a reply will ever come, which speaks volume about their support. Even if a reply eventually arrives, it’s a product that I will definitely steer clear of.

Forex Zombi

It’s a martingale classic grid with entries in both directions. There is at least 1 independent forward test that went boom with it.

1 click pips

As I originally suspected, many users confirm this was scam. It’s now sold for $1 just probably for building the mailing list of the marketer.

Auto FX Millionaire

Another scam from the same vendor as 1 click pips above – if the guy actually verified that account with myfxbook, why post a screenshot and not the link? As Maciej mentioned below, it is a signal service that copies trades from the 2 top signal providers in Zulutrade, Shooting Pips and Sharper Trade. Money management is also idiotic which led to not a few customer accounts blown.

As a side note, it’s funny how all these scams are being sold over Plimus now that Clickbank prohibits fake evidence.

EA Boss

It’s an exact copy of FAP Turbo. See the “When you thought” article at bestforexea.com.

TFOT

It is an almost identical copy of an early Forex Combo System version (I believe 2.1) with the reversal strategy removed and with a steeper price tag. Sure, the tweaks performed don’t seem to be so bad given the $10k it made in the past year, but knowing it’s a copy, I will stay away from it.

Oddbot

Soon after I started a forward test of this one, I found out its genealogical tree contains Wallstreet Forex Robot on the branch just above it, the difference being that Oddbot has a somewhat different exit mechanism and a news filter. I don’t make a habit of removing articles so it’s going to stay there.

Tom’s EA

Just an extremely overpriced martingale. I guess the vendor is trying to get as many clients as possible before his accounts are blown. I’m staying well away from this.

Range Trading Robot

Trades in grid-like fashion without a stop loss. When AUDCAD happens to be trending against it for a while, it will surely blow the account it’s running on.

ForexBody Money Printer

Just another hold-and-pray EA. Will open trades and simply wait until they’re in profit. It will eventually crash the account it’s running on and there are already such “samples” on the internet. This should be very conclusive, the account went boom in less than a month, luckily it was demo:

ForexBody Money Printer fail

NeuroTrader

Complete failure. This used to be a real account:

NeuroTrader fail

MetaiM5eurusd

A cracked copy of Million Dollar Pips distributed as a new product. It even includes the MDP 1.20 DLL with not as much as 1 byte changed.