A correctly-programmed EA can monitor hundreds of markets, meaning you don’t have to watch price movements 24 hours a day in order to find new opportunities. With an EA in place, you can decide how much time you want to dedicate to the markets - you could use an EA for trading alerts but open and close positions yourself, or allow it to open positions on your behalf and merely keep an eye on your running profit or loss.

Your EA can run on any market that you can trade using MT4, taking lots of information into account including price movements, economic announcements, technical indicators or even your current available balance. The ability to build hugely sophisticated algorithms that track many different markets makes EAs a powerful tool to support your trading.

Emotion can affect your bottom line. It might encourage you to hold on to a losing trade for longer than you should because you don’t want to realise the loss, or dive into a reckless trade too quickly, riding high off a big win. Automating your trading helps take the emotion out of your decision-making because an algorithm only views the markets in black and white.

Building a strategy is just the beginning as trusting it to take care of your capital is a big step to take. That’s why most traders will backtest their EA before letting it loose on live markets. Backtesting involves running your strategy against a chunk of real historical data and seeing how it performed, 

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While building a trading algorithm from scratch can be complicated, importing an EA just means choosing a program and tailoring it to your needs. The easy accessibility of EAs is probably the biggest reason for their popularity as an automated trading tool.

But while a well-coded, fully backtested and properly monitored EA can be hugely beneficial to your trading, there are some major pitfalls to avoid.