AI trading agent vs trading robot (EA): what is the difference?

1. What an EA is

An EA, or expert advisor, is a program attached to a chart in MetaTrader. It places and closes trades by rules written in code. Most bought EAs arrive as a compiled file, so you cannot read the rules, and you learn what they do by watching. The questions to ask first are in how to verify a gold EA's track record, and the ways it fails are in why gold EAs fail live. To run one, read how to run a gold EA on MT5.

2. What an AI trading agent is

At Baroq an AI trading agent is a set of rules you shape yourself: a mix of trend, momentum, mean reversion and breakout, the markets it watches and your own risk limits. You can move sliders or describe how you trade in a sentence. It trades on its own and writes the reason for every trade and every skip in a log. An optional AI step can approve or skip a trade, and it cannot change the size or the stop.

3. Where they differ

• The rules: an EA's are code, often hidden. An agent's are settings you can read.
• The limits: with an EA the limits are what its author built in. With an agent you set the loss per trade, the loss per day, the hours and the stops.
• Testing: an EA comes with the seller's backtest, which you should not trust until you have rerun it with costs. An agent's idea can be tested on past candles in the Lab, with the part it was not tuned on shown on its own.
• Money: an EA trades the account it is attached to. A Baroq agent trades demo money, and live trading is coming soon.

4. What stays the same

Neither one removes risk. A good test on past data does not tell you what comes next, and both can lose money. The same checks apply to both: size from the stop, as in how much to risk per trade, and read the costs, as in what a real backtest should include. Be wary of any seller who promises a result.

5. How to choose

Ask five things. Can I read the rules? Can I set every limit? Was it tested with costs on data it was not tuned on? Can I see why it took each trade? Did it run on a demo account first? If the answer to any of them is no, treat it as unproven. Our own ideas go through the same questions in public, on the record. No BaroqTech strategy has passed our judge yet, so nothing here says an agent will make money.

The Monthly Pass and the Lifetime Pass are software licences for your own MetaTrader account. They score every robot and strategy you run the same way, with costs inside every number. See the plans.

FAQ

An educational tool. It is not investment advice. Trading leveraged products such as gold CFDs carries a high risk of losing money, and you can lose all of it.

BaroqTech makes software. It is not investment advice and it does not manage money. Trading leveraged products such as gold CFDs carries a high risk of losing money, and you can lose all of it. Results from a test or from a demo account do not predict results on a real account.