Recently one of our mailing list members submitted a forex trading robot to us for review, which he purchased from MQL5.

We did a quick test of the EA on MT4 and quickly concluded it is Martingale. Just look at the backtest performance graph:

How to tell strategy is Martingale:

Note the portions circled in blue, you see a dip in equity followed by a sharp rebound. Note the “size”, it increases correspondingly. As with Martingale strategies, this EA clearly has a high win rate, but when it loses and suffers an equity dip, it quickly increases the trade size dramatically to recover.

The risk of such a system, as rare as they can be, are consecutive losses, where the trader’s account size is not large enough to “double down” for recovery. Martingale strategies typically offer poor risk: reward and hold on to large losing positions. Check out this article which we study how Martingale trading can work.

The more obvious way to tell a Martingale Robot:

Under the expert advisor settings, you see words such as “Martin”, “Grid”, “Lot Exponent” and “Multiplier”, which instruct the robot to increase the lot size following a losing trade.