The creation of any trading robot starts with an idea. This can be a ready-made system that you could find on various forums, or your own strategy. It doesn't matter where you got it from, what matters is what you do with it to turn it into a complete trading system.

Algorithm for developing a trading system

• Formulate your trading idea correctly. The origin of your idea can be anything, the most important thing is that the conditions for opening a deal and closing it are precisely defined. Often, novice traders believe that the most important thing is to enter the market correctly and do not care about how and when to close a position. This is one of the classic mistakes that all beginners make. Correct closing of a trade is actually much more important and you should think it over at the very beginning of building your system.
   
• Think over the risk management of the system. Even if the decision to open a deal is made by tossing a coin, heads - we buy, tails - we sell, the system can still be profitable if proper risk control is used.
  You need to consider:
  - the risk for each trade, namely the trade volume, stop loss and take profit, trailing stop. If you plan to close trades when the opposite signal appears, I still recommend using at least a stop loss as a safety net.
  - the overnight risk if you plan to hold trades for more than a few days. When transferring a deal to the next day, the broker charges a commission in the form of a swap, and over time, the amount of commission will only grow.
  - trading risk, which includes the maximum slippage, the maximum loss and the maximum number of losing trades in a row.
   
• Pick up the tools for its implementation. Determine on which trading instruments your system will work and select a timeframe. Perhaps what you planned to use on the major group of currency pairs will work better on exotic pairs or on indices. It is not necessary to trade only EURUSD, use what works best.

• Arrange all the rules in the form of an algorithm strategy. Determine what the trading robot will analyze, each tick, candle or just indicator values, build a hierarchy of each block of the algorithm and form a visual structure of your system. Such an algorithm will help you to look at your idea more clearly, perhaps at this stage you will have new thoughts or additions.

• Order the development of your trading advisor. After completing the algorithm from the previous paragraph, you will have a ready-made technical task to order a job from a programmer on the freelance exchange or from us.

• Test your robot. You have received the first version of your robot and you need to check it for errors. Errors can be related to both the broker and the advisor itself. All errors will be displayed in the MetaTrader log with the error codes indicated in the log, their description can be found at https://book.mql4.com/en/appendix/errors.

• Optimize your Expert Advisor. Once you have your finished trading robot, the development of the system is just beginning. Optimization of the advisor allows you to choose the best settings for trading a particular trading instrument, increasing the trading efficiency. During testing, you can choose the most optimal timeframe and simulate trading under any conditions. Optimization is very important, because this is the stage of setting up the robot, before launching it on a demo or real account.
   

Testing and optimization is an extremely important stage, not only because it allows you to check the system, but also because it reveals many nuances of automatic trading. Optimization problem to maximize the efficiency of the trading system for all possible indicators, which you never knew existed originally. But more on that in the next article.

As you can see, even if you have a very simple idea, there are a lot to consider to turn it into a full-fledged trading system. The good news is that it is not difficult and many of the nuances have long been thought out by someone else, just apply them to your system and you will be able to create a really worthy trading robot.