A downloaded EA that places no order is not usually broken. It is an EA that has not been given something it needs. Here is the list, ordered so that the tests which cost ten seconds come first. If you get through all nine and it still does nothing, the file is genuinely dead — and now you can say which check proved it.
135 of the 332 that compiled produced no trade at all. In the tester that is nearly always one of four things: the wrong symbol, the wrong timeframe, a lot size under the minimum, or an input nobody supplied. On a live chart there are three more ways to fail, because now there is a person attaching the file and a broker in the middle.
MT4 has a global AutoTrading button on the toolbar (Ctrl+E) and a per-EA Allow live trading checkbox under F7 → Common. The corner of the chart shows a smiling face only when both are on. A smiling face with no trades is almost always the second switch — there is no error, nothing in the log, the EA simply decides not to send anything. Some brokers turn AutoTrading back off after a reconnect, so look at it again after every login, not just the first one.
Brokers append suffixes: EURUSD.raw, EURUSDm, EURUSD.a. If the EA hardcodes the string EURUSD, every OrderSend comes back 4106 and nothing else happens. If it calls Symbol() it follows the chart and this is not your problem. Test: attach it to the exact name shown in Market Watch, and look for a symbol field in its inputs.
Most EAs read bars from the chart's own period. The same file on H4 and on M1 is not the same program: stop distance, signal threshold and trade frequency all scale with the bar. If the author's screenshots are H4 and yours is M1, you are not testing their result, you are testing a different one.
A risk-percent EA computes lots from balance × risk ÷ stop. On a small account that can land on 0.004, and MT4 normalises it to 0.00, so no order is ever sent. If it sends anyway you get 131 (invalid volume) or 134 (not enough money). The floor is 0.01 lots and it is a hard floor — below a few hundred dollars the smallest position the platform allows is already larger than the one the EA asked for.
Plenty of EAs carry MaxSpread in points and refuse to trade above it. 15 points is comfortable on EURUSD at 10:00 and impossible at 23:59, when raw accounts widen by five to ten times into the rollover. If the EA is also restricted to an overnight window, it will never see a spread it accepts. Watch Market Watch at the hour it is meant to trade, not at the hour you installed it.
An EA that evaluates once per bar does nothing for the rest of that bar. Attach at 14:03 on an H4 chart and the first decision is at 16:00 — two hours of watching a chart that looks dead. Some also have a session window that runs on the broker's server clock, which is not your clock: the server time is in the title bar of the Market Watch window.
Tools → Options → Expert Advisors. If the file carries a licence check, a news filter or a Telegram notifier it needs one of those two and will sit silent without them. A few show a message box on attach; most do not.
Metals and indices have daily maintenance windows — XAUUSD is commonly shut 23:00–01:00 server time — and the Sunday open is the worst moment to judge an EA, because spreads are five to ten times normal until liquidity returns and a spread filter rejects everything for the first hour.
An .ex5 will never appear in MT4's Navigator. An .ex4 compiled for build 600 will not load on build 1492, and the Experts tab says so in a single line that is easy to scroll past. If the file came from a download page rather than a repository, do not assume anything about which platform it was compiled for.
The EA's own Print() output and every trade error with its code. This is where you find out that OrderSend returned 131 ninety times.
Terminal-level events: login, connection, DLL permission, file not found. Not the EA's fault, and not visible in Experts.
MQL4/Logs/YYYYMMDD.log. On a Chinese-locale Windows this file is GBK — opened as UTF-8 it is unreadable gibberish, which is why people conclude the log is empty. Switch the encoding to ANSI.
Before blaming the broker, run the same EA in the Strategy Tester on the same symbol and period. If it trades there and not live, the difference is execution, not logic.
| Code | Means | What it usually is |
|---|---|---|
| 4109 | Trade is disabled | Global AutoTrading is off — check #1 |
| 4106 | Unknown symbol | Suffix mismatch between the chart and the code |
| 131 | Invalid trade volume | Lot size below the 0.01 floor, or above the cap |
| 134 | Not enough money | Free margin cannot cover the required margin |
| 130 | Invalid stops | SL/TP closer than the broker's stop level |
| 138 | Requote | Price moved between request and fill; normal on news |
| 146 | Trade context busy | Another order is in flight; the EA retries or drops it |
| 148 | Too many orders | Hitting MaxOrders in the EA, or the broker's cap |
| 4066 | No history data | Tools → History Center, download the symbol |
Four of these nine are configuration, not bugs. That ratio is why a downloaded EA can look broken on nine charts out of ten and still be fine.
Two things it needs from here, and both of them are boring.
Nothing on this site was tested on anything but a demo, and the first month of any EA should be a demo too. The tester already told you whether the logic is worth watching. The demo tells you the one thing the tester cannot: whether your broker's execution matches it.
There is no link here yet, and that is deliberate. This site is applying for a partner arrangement with the broker its own tests run on, and until that is approved there is nothing to click. Open a demo with whichever broker you already use — every check on this page is broker-independent, and a demo costs nothing either way.
An EA is not a signal service. It is a program attached to a running terminal, and a laptop that sleeps at 03:00 does not trade at 03:04 — and tells nobody it missed. A trading VPS is $10–25 a month. Do that division before you buy one: the best honest result in our 372-EA batch made 0.48% a month. On a $300 account that is $1.44. A $10 VPS costs seven times what the strategy makes. Run it on a machine you already leave switched on, and revisit the VPS when the account is big enough that a missed trade costs more than the rent.
No referral link here either, for the same reason. Our own setup is a $5–7 1-core Linux box running MT4 under Wine, written up in the lab notes — that is cheaper than any trading-VPS plan and it is what we actually use, so it is what we would have to recommend.
It will not rank brokers, it will not name a “best” VPS, and it will not put a code in your checkout. A page like this is the most natural place on a trading site to sell something, and the only reason it works at all is that it does not. If a link ever appears above, it appears with the sentence saying what it is, on the same screen, in the same size type — not in a footer nobody reads.
If it still does not trade after all nine, tell me what the Experts tab said and I will look at the file — the contact page is here. That is also how the ninth check got written.