In any jargon filled subset of your world there will be people that live and breathe their passion. The folk that will be up all night testing, practising and re testing what ever it might be that they are completely into. Perhaps it is music, staying up half the night playing the same tune or maybe on the computer playing what ever game floats their boat. They become expert at whatever they do within that narrow subset of activities.

This is also true of financial traders. They will spend half the night every night, playing with certain systems, testing and re-testing particular scenarios using what ever computer system they like or have to hand. MT4 or Metatrader 4 seems to be the flavour of the month / year. You can test and re-test with relative ease. You can convince the system and convince yourself that this system is the silver bullet. You can make Robots using their system EAs they are called. Expert Advisors. Gone are the days of spending weeks or months figuring out systems double checking and re-double checking your system before you presented it to the Chairman of your financial company. Now you can spend a couple of weeks and bingo a new and better system arrives back- tested 20 years. Back testing by the way does not mean that the future testing will give you the same result but hey, what else have I got to go on. Er.. real live maybe. Fundamentals, like reading newspapers and talking to certain companies and making phone calls to various industries, like lobbying government etc...NO that is old fashioned and too much work. Just give me a piece of software and a couple of weeks and I will come up with a system that is so expert it will knock you for six!!

Hmm these EAs seem to be all the rage must give them a try. In fact why not use a Robot, then I can just go to my day job, and rake in plenty of dosh without so much as a sweat. Who wants to watch the screens anyway, I would rather watch the Football Screen and make money at the same time.

So lets invest in a Robot right? Wrong! Like the person up all night playing the computer game, like the muso up all night rehearsing that tune and indeed like the Forex Junkie up all night working with software to produce the killer system they all have one thing in common. They know what they are doing (to a certain extent). But when it comes to giving it to someone else to do, like the muso saying " here is the tune it is easy to play", OK Mozart I'll give it a go. Or the computer geek saying all you have to do is set this to this and then that to this and make sure that you use this time frame and that signal option and that you have at least this much in your account and that you....Ad infinitum...

The truth about all these systems and experts is that if you don't put in the time YOURSELF you at the mercy of someone else's system and it will never really do the business the way you want it to. So do yourself a favour and do the time yourself.

It is definitely worth it. Now about this Electric Ladyland riff.

Ron Ruhle writes for a number of magazines and also trades the Forex Markets successfully. He uses a number of self taught systems he got from http://www.fxtraderlive.com and also invested in books for Amazon.