New to trading?
Start here — the honest way.

Before anything else, learn the language. Trading is simply buying an instrument (gold, a currency pair, an index) hoping to sell it later at a different price. You do not need a finance degree, but you do need to know a handful of terms cold:

Spend a few hours here. Everything later makes more sense once these six words are second nature.

An Expert Advisor (EA) is an automated trading program that runs inside MetaTrader 5. It watches the chart 24/5 and opens, manages, and closes trades according to a fixed set of rules — without you clicking anything. That is its superpower: it never gets tired, greedy, or scared.

What an EA is:

• A rules engine that executes a strategy consistently, day and night
• A way to remove emotion — the number one killer of beginner accounts
• Something you can test on years of past data before risking a cent

What an EA is not:

• A money-printing machine — no honest EA wins every trade
• Something you set once and never watch again
• Immune to bad markets or a badly chosen broker

So what do my EAs actually do? They trade "breakouts" — one of the simplest ideas in trading. Picture a price that has been stuck in a narrow range for a while, like a spring being compressed. When it finally "breaks out" and pushes past that range, it often keeps moving in that direction. My EAs wait patiently for that moment and jump in when it happens, with a stop loss already in place in case it doesn't work out. That's the whole idea — no crystal ball, just a clear rule applied consistently.

If you want the deeper reasoning behind running several strategies together, this is a good read once you are comfortable: why a portfolio approach beats a single EA.

Now you get hands-on — with zero risk. A demo account is a full trading account funded with virtual money. It behaves exactly like the real thing, so it is the perfect sandbox.

• Pick a broker — you open your account (demo or real) through a broker. A demo needs no deposit and no commitment, so this is completely free
• Download MetaTrader 5 (free) — your broker gives you the download link once you register, or you can get it from the MetaQuotes site
• Open a demo account inside the platform — takes two minutes, no money required
• Get familiar: open a manual trade, set a stop loss, watch it move, close it

Don't have a broker yet? No problem — that's the one thing you need before you can practise. I list the brokers I personally use and trust in Step 5 below, and any of them lets you open a free demo in minutes. My tip: open your demo with the broker you'd eventually go live with, so nothing changes when you're ready for real trading. If you just want to get started right away, IC Trading is my go-to for running EAs.

Do not rush past this. Clicking around a demo for a few days removes the fear of the platform, so that when an EA is doing the work you actually understand what you are looking at.

First, get the EA into MetaTrader 5. Installing an EA is quick once you have seen it done — drop the file into the right folder, refresh, drag it onto a chart, and enable AutoTrading. This short video walks through the whole process from start to finish:

How to install an EA on MetaTrader 5 Watch on YouTube ↗

Video by BlackBull Markets — one of my partner brokers. Opens in a new tab; the steps are identical for any MT5 broker.

This is the fun part. Backtesting means running an EA against years of real historical price data in minutes, so you can see how it would have performed before you ever go live. I give away two of my own EAs for free precisely so beginners have something real and trustworthy to practise with.

• JARA ORB — a clean gold & yen breakout EA, ideal for a first backtest
• Jara Gold Fusion — a 4-strategy gold system for when you want a little more

Load one into MetaTrader 5's Strategy Tester, pick a few years of history, and press start. Watch the equity curve. Notice the drawdown. This single exercise teaches you more than hours of reading ever will. New to the process? I wrote a plain-English guide: how to backtest an EA.

Once an EA has convinced you on demo and on backtest, you can put it on a small real account. "Small" is the key word: start with an amount that, if it vanished entirely, would not hurt your life. The goal at this stage is to learn how live execution feels — not to get rich.

How much do I actually need? There's no magic number, and I can't tell you what's right for your situation — but to set expectations: many beginners start testing on a real account with somewhere around $100 to $500. That's enough to see how an EA behaves with real money on the line, while small enough that the lesson never costs more than a night out. You can always add more later once you trust what you're running. Start smaller than you think you should.

• Choose a reputable, well-regulated broker with tight spreads on the symbols you trade
• Fund the minimum you are comfortable losing while you learn
• Keep risk per trade tiny and let the EA follow its plan without interference
• Consider a VPS so the EA runs 24/5 even when your computer is off

The broker matters more than beginners expect — when an EA places every trade, tiny costs add up fast. The main cost is the spread: a small gap between the buy and sell price that you pay on each trade. Lower spread = more of the profit stays yours. All of the brokers below are ones I use and trust for automated trading, and my two premium-free EAs are available at no cost to clients who open through my partner links. My top pick for running EAs is IC Trading, but any of these is a solid start:

Disclosure: I am an Introducing Broker for these brokers and may receive a commission on accounts opened through my links, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend what I use myself.

Once you are comfortable running one EA live, the next leap is diversification. A single strategy has good months and bad months. Several uncorrelated strategies — different symbols, different market conditions — smooth the ride and are far easier to stick with emotionally.

• Add strategies that trade different instruments and setups, not more of the same
• Track everything honestly — a losing month is data, not a verdict
• Keep learning; treat this as a multi-year skill, because that is what it is

When you reach this stage, my paid EAs are built to work together as a portfolio rather than compete. But there is no rush — the free EAs will teach you plenty first.