There is one overlooked error that causes most trading beginners to lose all their trading capital within six months or less. The worst possible outcome is something like the world record for being struck by lightning. If you read the Wikipedia article about Roy Sullivan, you will learn that this guy is the only person that survived seven lightning strokes. An expert advisor can get results without much human effort because your expert advisor will trade whatever you tell him without you sitting in front of the screen. If you only traded five times and you consider making your decisions based on that outcome, you become a victim of the so-called base rate fallacy.

If you try to trade your feelings, you probably should not consider to trade at all. At some point in time you want to change or add something and I think the best option for every trader is to code his or her own system by themselves.

You could manually trade your strategy with historical data. So I tried to do that and it was a frustrating experience for me. Most people think that backtesting is a tool to find the right kind of entry signal, but actually the more valuable thing is that it will help you to find out how to scale your system to survive financial earthquakes. We all hope that we will not see another crisis in the near future, but it is always a good idea to backtest outstanding situations and learn from those results. The trick is to achieve positive results even if the trading conditions are bad.

Some time ago, my former employer released a company policy that simple login passwords could no longer be used. His idea was to increase the security, but it didn’t work. And what happened? People started to write their passwords on a piece of paper and store that piece of paper under the desk pad. If your equity suddenly is going downhill, that is the right time to decrease the risk.

For my own trading, the drawdowns for multiplied lot sizes are a little bit too big, but you will get a good impression of what is possible when you try it on a demo account. So why would you do stupid things like revenge trades? Because the money has a meaning for your life. What do I need to know for a trading recipe? You need to know the ingredients because without the right ingredients, your meal will not be tasty.

If you are able to deal with strict rules without manipulation, you have good chances to become profitable in the long run. In MetaTrader5, historical data does not need to be imported. It is automatically downloaded when you start a backtest for the first time. Every drawdown is something that produces fear and other bad feelings. So often the temptation is high to change the trading system.

I would suggest that you always pick the same time span for strategy tests because that will make it easy to compare the results. One of the things that are a good way to become a better trader might be a smaller account size for your real account, you can’t avoid crises, so you need a system that you can trust. It takes something that is able to make profits under all market conditions. I think a trader needs to grow with his account, and I always encourage people to start with a demo account.