May 24, 2024 2 min read Expert Advisor

How to Get Your MetaTrader 5 EA AutoTrading on a Chart

Learn how to get your EA autotrading on MetaTrader 5

Getting your very first EA can be incredibly exciting! You’ve invested time in building your strategy, analyzed the data, and put it together into an automated trading bot. Whether you got someone to build it for you, or if built it yourself, here you are.

You might be sitting there wondering:

So…how do I actually get this working?

I’m exceptionally glad you asked because that’s exactly what this article will help you to do 😃

Ready, Set, AutoTrade

Before You Continue, Check Your Settings

Just a quick one, a common mistake people make is not checking that their MT5 settings are correct. If you want a quick reminder on what you need to confirm, check out this article.

Step 1: Open the Navigator View

Your expert advisors are all stored in the navigator view of your termial. You can get to this by:

View -> Navigator

Step 2: Locate Your Expert Advisors

Inside the Navigator, you’ll find a list of different folders you can look through.

To get to your Advisors, head to the folder named ‘Expert Advisors’

Expert advisors inside of your MT5 Navigator

Step 3: Inside Your Expert Advisors

Depending on how you imported your Expert Advisor, you will find your expert advisor in one of two places in this folder.

One is at the top level, and one is inside the ‘Advisors’ folder. I’ve shown examples of both below:

Some of the places you find your EA in MetaTrader 5

Step 4: Drag Your Chosen EA Onto an Open Chart Window

Once you’ve found your Expert Advisor, it’s time to add it to your chart.

To do this, simply drag it over to the chart and drop it on. This will trigger the EA to initialize, at which point it will open up for you to add your parameters.

The GIF below demonstrates this using one of the built in Expert Advisors that come with MetaTrader 5.