How I do this
What I actually do before writing something up, so you know what you're reading.
Last updated
This isn’t a formal review process. I’m a trader who’s been around EAs long enough to have opinions, and this site is where I write them down for other traders.
But you shouldn’t take my word for anything, so here’s what sits behind a post.
Where the stuff comes from
Usually I bought it. Sometimes I ran it. Sometimes I just watched someone’s public signal for two years and took screenshots.
Every post says which, because “I put $5k of my own money in this” and “I watched from the sidelines” are very different levels of confidence and you deserve to know which one you’re getting.
When there’s a backtest
If I’ve run it, I publish the full setup — data source, spread, commission, period, modelling quality. Real tick data, variable spread. Not broker M1 with interpolated ticks, which flatters anything trading small intrabar moves.
Minimum 12 months, usually 5 years or more. An EA that’s only seen one kind of market hasn’t been tested.
I also check the boring things that kill most of them: shift the parameters 10% and see if the profit evaporates, rerun at a realistic retail spread, and read the trade log for martingale sizing and missing stops.
When there isn’t
Plenty of posts have no backtest at all, and some of those are the most useful ones. A signal that went to zero twice tells you more than any tester run. A dev whose last three products vanished tells you plenty.
Those posts are marked no backtest so you’re not confused about what you’re reading.
Screenshots
I archive things. Sales pages get edited, signals get reset, MyFxbook accounts go private at remarkably convenient moments. Screenshots in my posts have capture dates on them for exactly that reason.
The number
Every post gets a score out of 10 for whether the seller is straight with you. Not whether it’s safe — an honestly-sold martingale can still destroy your account, and I’ll say so separately.
Where there’s a backtest, the number is arithmetic from the findings and I can’t fiddle it. Where there isn’t, I set it by hand and say so on the post, with my reasoning written out.
What I won’t do
I don’t call things scams. Not because I’m being polite about it — because “the backtest doesn’t reproduce and the live account was quietly deleted in March” is something I can show you, and “scam” is just a word. The specific version does more damage anyway.
I don’t take money from EA sellers. Ever, in any form. See who pays.
If I’m wrong
Tell me and I’ll fix it in public. See corrections.