When I was a little boy, I had a very bad idea. I wanted to leave our yard on a skateboard and close the garden door. When I tried to do that, my mother yelled at me and as I answered I made a mistake. I simply forgot to release the door handle. So I fell on my butt, still holding that door handle with my hand. Well, that obviously was a mistake. And you might have similar experiences, maybe with a bike or roller blades. I must admit that I didn’t like it, but that is how you learn things as a child. You fall on your butt. You get up. And you fall on your butt again. That isn’t always fun, though. But someone once asked an interesting question. When would you tell your child that it is better to stop trying to learn how to walk? If you have any children, you probably know the answer. Mistakes and errors are part of the process. To learn anything, you need to try something. That involves the risk of failing. When I started to trade, I was convinced that it couldn’t be so hard to make a good profit. I mean, how hard could it be to find out if the price will go up or down? Well, it turned out that it was not as easy as I thought. I made a lot of mistakes – and I still continue to do this. As a beginner I always felt that demo accounts are a waste of time. Does that sound familiar to you? Does it feel like you are wasting your time? Do you think that you need to make real money as fast as possible? In that case you might need to flatten your account before you become more patient. Most beginners manage to do that – within the first six months. But today I am a little smarter and do it on a demo account. Usually I have an idea and change something in one of my systems. Basically I clone the system and open a new demo account for the new version. That account needs to be traded automatically for at least three months. If it works as desired, everything is okay. But most of the time something goes wrong and I still think that the most money you can make at the beginning is the money you don’t lose on a real account. Humans have a weakness: They always try to save time and effort! So the evolution gave us something that is called heuristics. Heuristics are basically a shortcut to make decisions faster, without spending much brain power to solve the problem. Here is a simple example for you, please try to get the answer as fast as possible: How many animals of each kind brought Moses to the ark? If you are in any kind like me, your answer is probably two, is it? You might have considered that this is a trick question, but you are really confident that two animals of each kind have been saved by the ark. And that is true, but your answer to the question is still false. Moses did NOT have anything to do with the ark – that was Noah! You fall for the trick, because Moses also belongs to the bible context – so you didn’t spend much attention to the name. And that is exactly what happens to most traders: They focus on the entry and after they have lost all their money, they start to ask the right questions. Is the entry really the most important thing to make profits? Is there a way to make profits with any kind of entry? Is one entry better than another one? And how could I measure or prove that? Basically there should be a way to find out, if something is better than another solution. Automated trading offers a good way to find out the differences, because you can use so called backtests. A backtest is a way to trade something for a period of time, change a single parameter and trade the same period again. Imagine you could do that with any kind of entry signal for any currency pair. Wouldn’t that be a good way to get a lot of experience in a very short time? Actually that is one of the biggest benefits in automated trading! You can make thousands of trades in a few minutes. You can trade one year or ten years, one or ten currency pairs and improve things again and again! You can make as many mistakes as you want,