What are Expert Advisors (EA’s) and are they offered through MetaTrader4 (MT4)?

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Expert Advisors (EAs) are programs that run on MT4, they are used to monitor and trade financial markets using algorithms. EA’s are not what the name suggests and they do not provide traders with any kind of personal advice. 

An EA is a program that runs through MT4 to monitor and automatically carry out trading actions without a trader’s direct involvement. When you install an EA, you’ll need to set up certain criteria such as trigger alerts, notifications, and trading actions depending on the preferred market conditions that you’ve programmed the EA to follow. And once your position is open, an EA can add close conditions including stops, trailing stops and limits.

Traders can use EAs to monitor markets. The EA would alert you when it finds a potential opportunity that meets your set criteria. Traders can create their own EA or download someone else's. 

It’s important to backtest your EA. Backtesting involves running your strategy against real historical data and seeing how well it performed, helping you identify issues before you lose real money. You can do this by clicking ‘view’ in the top navigation bar. In the tester, select the EA you want to run, as well as the market and timeframe you want to run it against. Backtesting an EA is important to ensure that it is working currently.

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