Topic: How To Invest

Pat: A friend of mine recently purchased a “Trading Robot.” He is ecstatic because the robot can trade 24 hours a day with inputted instructions respecting trading. He is required to place his investment funds with a brokerage in Dubai, although he says he will set up a segregated account in the U.K. What is your opinion/experience with “Trading Robots”? Many thanks.

Article Excerpt

Foreign exchange (“forex”) trading robots automatically place trades on your behalf using a complex formula. These robots are typically marketed with impressive-looking performance records. However, those records are typically derived by “back-testing” the program against past data. In other words, the promoters go back through old trading records and see what would have worked in the past. Automated systems that make trading decisions for you can only do two laborious, but essentially simple things. First, they narrow down the data that you use to make investment decisions. Second, they then apply some fixed rule or rules to draw a conclusion or an investment decision from that selection of data. The trouble is that the market’s key concerns continually change. Today’s hot buttons can turn into tomorrow’s dead ends. A standard marketing claim reads like this: “Well, simple and to the point: if you back-test a robot and it shows 100% ‘demo’ profit in one month, it should PRODUCE around 80-100% profit…