OUR METHODOLOGY
How We Test
Expert Advisors
Most EA reviews online are marketing dressed up as testing. Here's exactly what we check, in what order, before an EA ever appears on this site - including the ones that don't pass.
Two Evidence Tracks,
Two Standards
TRACK 1
Live-Verified Track Record
History detailed via Myfxbook, FXBlue, or MQL5 to ensure real market conditions and live execution validation.
TRACK 2
Independently Backtested
Rigorous re-running of historical data over extended periods to verify algorithmic integrity and stress-test core logic.
Strict Filtering Process
What Disqualifies An
EA Automatically
Before an Expert Advisor even reaches our testing environment, it must clear a rigid set of baseline constraints. A failure on any of the following points results in an immediate rejection:
No independent verification of any kind — screenshots and PDFs are not evidence.
Guaranteed profit language or unrealistic marketing claims.
Undisclosed martingale, grid, or high-risk recovery strategies.
Collapsing backtests indicating curve-fitting or structural fragility.
Fewer than 100 closed trades in verified live market conditions.
Four Possible Verdicts
Passing our checklist and evidence review does not automatically mean an outright recommendation. We use four verdicts, and we hold ourselves to a genuinely high bar before using the top one. At the time of writing, exactly one Expert Advisor has earned it — Perceptrader AI.
Passed our full checklist, has genuine live or independently re-tested evidence, and either a long, high-volume track record or real independent corroboration — with no significant unresolved concerns. A long record can carry a recommendation on its own; where it does, we say openly that there is no outside coverage.
Passed our checklist with no violations, but the evidence is not yet strong enough for a confident recommendation — usually a short record, a withdrawn signal, or no independent coverage to cross-check the seller's own numbers. Inconclusive is not a finding of wrongdoing. It means we could not reach a verdict on the evidence available.
Failed our checklist outright, or a verdict we reversed after re-verification found the evidence did not support what had been claimed for it. A Not Recommended verdict always names the specific criterion that was failed, with sources.
Assessment is in progress. No verdict has been reached, and the absence of one should not be read as either an endorsement or a warning.
The Thresholds, In Full
These are the objective criteria an Expert Advisor must clear. Failing any one of them means no Recommended verdict, regardless of headline returns. They are published here in full, on the page, because a standard you cannot read is not a standard.
Evidence integrity
Before any figure is assessed, we establish that the evidence describes the product being sold.
- The track record must belong to the product under review. Where a developer markets an older product's live signal alongside a newer release, that record evidences the older product. The newer one is treated as unverified, however long the signal has run.
- Fewer than 100 closed trades in verified live conditions is an automatic disqualification from a Recommended verdict. Fewer trades is insufficient evidence in either direction.
- A growth figure distorted by deposits and withdrawals is not published. Where an account's cash flows are large relative to its balance, a percentage return measures the funding pattern rather than the strategy, and we say so instead of reproducing the number.
- The same account shown on two platforms is not independent corroboration. It is one record displayed twice.
Risk
Drawdown is the figure we lead on, because it is the one that describes what happens to your money.
- A drawdown materially larger than the marketing implies is an automatic fail. There is no universal acceptable number — but a gap between what a buyer is told and what the record shows is a failure of disclosure, not of performance. This applies to live-verified and backtested evidence alike, and it extends to affiliate and reseller marketing the seller benefits from, not only to the seller's own pages.
- A wipeout or near-wipeout is disqualifying. Poor performance during a stress period is not automatically fatal; losing substantially all of an account is.
- Both drawdown measures are published wherever a platform reports them — by balance and by equity, each labelled. The gap between the two is where a grid or averaging system's real exposure sits, and quoting only one is always a choice about which to show you.
- Where a seller publishes several accounts at different risk settings, we publish the range across their real accounts rather than the best one.
Whether the edge is real
- A high win rate with a poor payoff ratio is treated as a warning, not a strength. Very high win rates frequently conceal tail risk that the win rate itself cannot show. We have reviewed a real account that won 57 of its 58 trades and still lost 96% of its capital. We therefore never publish a win rate without the profit factor or the average-win-to-average-loss ratio beside it, and we never rank Expert Advisors by win rate.
- Performance concentrated in a handful of trades fails. If removing a few exceptional trades collapses profitability, the strategy is not robust.
- A profit factor at or near 1.0 across a large sample indicates an edge that has decayed to breakeven, and will not earn a recommendation however long the record.
- Recovery factor is used as a discriminator; the Sharpe ratio is recorded where a platform reports it but is never a pass or fail criterion and never appears in our reasoning. Across differing monitoring periods and trade counts, platform-reported Sharpe is not comparable, and at two decimal places the differences are noise.
- A suspiciously smooth equity curve with no visible drawdown is treated as a likely sign of curve-fitting or an undisclosed martingale or grid mechanism, both of which can look flawless for a long stretch before one catastrophic loss.
Claims and sourcing
- No claim without a retrievable source. Every assertion we make about a third party carries a link to where we read it, with the date. Where a source has since disappeared, we say so and place no weight on its specific claims.
- A critic's interests are disclosed as readily as a seller's. Criticism published by someone selling a competing product is cited for transparency, never used as support for a verdict.
- Every figure is a dated snapshot carrying its source and measurement period. We never silently refresh figures to track current values — doing so would let a verdict ride on numbers that were never the ones assessed.
Beyond The Seller's Own Evidence
A live track record on Myfxbook, FXBlue or MQL5 tells us the seller's own numbers are real. It does not tell us what other traders actually experienced. So for every Expert Advisor we also check independent platforms — ForexPeaceArmy, Trustpilot, the MQL5 community and its Traders' Blogs, and the buyer reviews on the product's own listing — for anything the seller's marketing would not show us.
One record on two sites is not corroboration. Where the same trading account appears on both MQL5 and Myfxbook, that is one record displayed twice, and we do not present it as independent confirmation. We have made this mistake ourselves and corrected it on the page. Real corroboration means an independent party's experience of the product: buyer reviews, a review platform's record, or documented third-party testing.
We do not take any single review at face value in either direction. This space has real competitor smear campaigns and real fake positive reviews, so we weigh specific, detailed complaints more heavily than vague ones and look for patterns across multiple independent sources rather than isolated one-offs. When a review platform itself documents a history of manipulated reviews for a product, we treat that as citable evidence — and we cite it, with the link.
A critic's interests matter as much as a seller's. We have encountered criticism of an Expert Advisor published by someone selling a competing product in the same post. We cite sources like that for transparency and we disclose the conflict, but we never let them carry a verdict. The same test we apply to a glowing endorsement applies to a damaging one: who benefits from believing it?
If an Expert Advisor has no independent footprint at all — common for newer products — we say so plainly. That absence is not a red flag on its own. Combined with a short record, it is usually enough to hold back a Recommended verdict until more evidence exists either way. And where a long, high-volume record earns a recommendation without outside coverage, we state that there is none rather than implying corroboration we do not have.
Our Rule on
Conflicts of Interest
We check every EA against these criteria before we know whether it has an affiliate program. Affiliate availability is never a search criterion or part of the verdict — it's a bonus disclosed after the fact. If we ever adopt an EA for one of our own live accounts, that only happens after it's already passed on its own merits, and it's always disclosed clearly on the review.
We Publish The
Failures Too
Most review sites only show you the winners. When an EA doesn't pass our checklist or backtesting regime, we publish exactly why — tied directly to which specific criterion it failed, not vague opinion. If you're searching for an honest answer on a specific EA, that's exactly what you'll find here, pass or fail.
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