Before you buy any forex expert advisor you have to look for the following.

There are many expert advisors available on the internet which tell you they are very good and they make you a lot of money if you use them. But you don’t know if it is real or not. The following are some of the things that will help you to decide whether you want to buy it or not.

Are they providing proof of their results:
The first thing you need to check before you want to buy an expert advisor is whether any proof of the results is presented or not. If any results are presented check the results to make sure that they are not made up using some kind of software like photoshop etc.

Are they hypothetical/actual:
If any results are provided by the forex expert advisor manufacturers check if the results are hypothetical or actual. Hypothetical results are the results that the expert advisor is run for some period in the past and the results are provided.

Actual results are the results that the expert advisor is run on live trading for some time and the results are provided.

If they are providing only hypothetical results – no good
If only hypothetical results are provided and no real data is provided that means its of no good. Moreover if the hypothetical results are presented only for old years but the latest ones you better not to buy that.

If real – for how many months of latest data they are providing
If actual results are presented look for at least the last 3 months of the results. Some of the expert advisors give you to a username and password to a demo account which can be presented on the web. You can login to that demo account and see how the trades are going. If it is going good it is a very good expert advisor.

Go to web – look for reviews of that robot, check what people are saying about it
Go to google or any of your favorite search engine and search for the expert advisor reviews. When you search look for the forum results. Some of the reviews are developed by the expert advisor manufacturers itself, saying that they are someone else, and they say that the expert advisor is very good and it can make you a lot of money. But if you see for forum results, which have a lot of replies for that post, you can go through different replies and look for what people are saying and you can decide.

Check if it works only for some brokers or all brokers.
Some of the expert advisors work for only some broker platforms. For example there is one expert advisor I know, which is “Extreme EURGBP Scalping”. It works only for some brokers as it requires a maximum spread of 3 pips and only some brokers will provide that.

Check if it works only on some GMT timings.
Some of the expert advisors work only in some specific GMT timings. For example the above scalping expert advisor will work only in Asian market timings as the forex market movements are really very low in those timings.

Check if it can be backtested or not, if not don’t buy it.
Check if the expert advisor can be backtested if you buy it. If you can not backtest that and if the expert advisor manufacturer says that you can directly use it on live trading, you better not to buy it.

Check for what currency pairs it works
Check for what currency pairs it works. If the information is not provided on the web by the EA developer you may think that it will work for all the currency pairs. But in real it may work for only some. If this information is not provided send an email to the EA developers asking them for the information about currency pairs.
After you buy the Expert Advisor

Backtest it properly before you use it in your real trading
Back test it properly for different time periods to make sure that it is working fine for different time periods.

For example you can backtest it for years like
2001 Jan 1st – 2001 Dec 1st
2002 Jan 1st – 2002 Dec 1st
2003 Jan 1st – 2003 Dec 1st etc

If you don’t know how to backtest an expert advisor you can check my article at

http://www.forexbees.com/forex-articles/how-backtest-expert-advisor-metatrader

Run it on a demo account for at least a week
Open a demo account and let the expert advisor run for at least one week on the demo account so that you can know if is correctly working or not.