Battle of the Robots: Buy Expert Advisor or Free Download?
Sooner or later any trader comes to the idea of using a Advisors. By typing into the search engine "trading advisor" a trader receives an unimaginable number of links to resources offering trading robots. Classification of Expert Advisors is quite extensive: scalpers, martingales, netniki, trending and so on. We will divide all the existing Expert Advisors on the Internet into categories of a completely different plan: free, licensed and pirate (hacked) robots.
Everything is more or less clear with free Expert Advisors: they either worked out long ago, or their further development has stopped for some reason. Therefore, let's consider the advantages and disadvantages of using the last two categories: paid licensed and cracked Expert Advisors.
Why do traders prefer "pirates"?
Nowadays, anything can be found on the Internet. Many users use pirated products, hacked software is downloaded in terabytes. Expert Advisors are no exception.
Licensed Expert Advisors are created by a team of developers and offered for sale on specialized platforms and websites of the authors. Often, to evaluate the capabilities of the robot, developers provide some period of free use. According to the law of the genre, after some time there appears a free, i.e. pirated version of a paid Expert Advisor, obtained by hacking the licensed version.
And it is here that most traders, choosing between a "license" and a "pirate", opt for the second option. It should be taken into account that these are not random people who came to the site with a twenty in their pocket and the desire to "win" a million by Monday. They are serious enough traders, 25-40 years old, with the ability to invest about $1,000 in the trade.
What stops them from buying a licensed EA? Several factors can be distinguished:
- First, it is the price of a licensed robot. It ranges from several tens to several hundred dollars.
- Secondly, there is a huge choice of trading advisors. An unsophisticated trader is faced with the agony of choice, and if it is also associated with a high price - a currency speculator will simply run away from such prospects.
- And thirdly, it is the "cat in the bag" syndrome. It is this syndrome that often plays a decisive role. A trader's thoughts range from "I'll buy it, and it will just drain my deposit" to "I doubt anything worthwhile will be on open sale, only junk is being sold".
As a result, the trader stops to find resources where you can download tons of trading robots for free.
"License" or "pirate": is there a big difference?
And now we need to think, what is the point of hacking into EAs for free distribution? What kind of altruism is this?
To understand the process, let us give a simple analogy. For example, some long-awaited movie comes out. A self-respecting person goes to see it in the theater, and then, if you like it, will buy a licensed disk to his collection. However, let's not make a secret out of it, almost immediately after the premiere, in the network appears a pirated copy of this movie in CamRip quality. This is where the sound is drowned out by the crunch of popcorn, and the image is as if you were watching it from underwater.
Why is it done? The answer is simple - to attract visitors to your site or blog, for each of which the owner drops a penny. As they say - the first one up, the first one down. Posted a pirated copy of the movie in lousy quality first - went people to the site.
The same thing happens with Expert Advisors. After looking at the trading robot and its price, a trader adds "free download" to the name of the Expert Advisor in a search engine and gets links to the same Expert Advisor, but already hacked and not worth a penny. As a result, the robot is received for free, but only, as in the above analogy, in the quality of CamRip. And if with movies it is possible to further develop the quality - DVDRip, BDRip and so on, then no one will bother with advisors.
You should understand that almost all software products, even paid ones, have one or another error or another. The first version of the product is put out, the price of which is symbolic, so to speak - for testing, for free use and advertising. During these days or weeks, the developers identify flaws, after which the second and next versions appear, with the problems already eliminated.
As a result, a trader who bought the Expert Advisor gets a version in which all the flaws have been eliminated. A trader who has downloaded a pirated version of the robot is left with a CamRip, i.e. with all the errors and no chance to fix anything, because in the hacked code, even an experienced programmer can make improvements with extreme difficulty. So it is completely unknown how stable the work of such a robot can be.
There's an easier option. Couldn't hack the advisor? No problem. Just change the name, tweak the settings a bit, and you're done. There will be no claims anyway - the robot is provided free of charge.
Well, are you ready to entrust your money to such a "pirate" advisor?
counselor without warranties
Naturally, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Each licensed Expert Advisor comes with settings or, simply put, sets. Having bought such a robot, a trader is guaranteed to receive updates of settings, while the owner of a hacked EA will receive an outdated set at the stage of downloading, if he gets anything at all.
The same applies to client support. Developers of trading advisors are serious people, so there is always customer support on their websites, where you can contact in case of problems and questions. In turn, the owner of a "pirated" Expert Advisor is deprived of such an opportunity.
You may not like a trading advisor, things happen. Almost all sellers have a certain period of time before the expiration of which you can get your money back.
Well, we won't even mention intellectual property protection and copyright. Here, as they say, is the default.
To consolidate the material presented, let's draw conclusions in the form of a table
Whether to download a "pirate" or to buy a licensed trading advisor - the choice is certainly yours. We hope that the above arguments will help you make the right choice.
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