How to choose an MT5 expert advisor subscription: 7 questions to ask before you pay
Before paying for any MT5 expert advisor subscription, get clear answers on seven things: what the strategy actually is, the worst-case risk, what the risk controls do, how backtests are presented, licensing and cancellation terms, the company behind it, and support. A vendor who dodges any of them has answered anyway.
Why the EA market rewards scepticism
The expert advisor market has a structural problem: the product is judged on an equity curve, and equity curves are easy to manufacture. Curated backtests, demo accounts reset after bad runs, and results pages with no third-party verification are common enough that a careful buyer should treat every performance claim as unproven until shown otherwise. Subscriptions raise the stakes, because you are not making one purchase but signing up to a recurring relationship with the vendor.
We sell Grit Markets, an MT5 expert advisor subscription, so we are not neutral observers here. The most useful thing we can do about that is publish the checklist we think you should hold every vendor to, and answer it ourselves in public. The seven questions below will disqualify a large share of the market. That is the point.
Questions 1 and 2: what is the strategy, and what is the worst case?
Question one: what does the EA actually do? You do not need source code, but you do need the strategy class and its known failure modes in plain language. Grid, Martingale, breakout, mean reversion, news scalping: each has a characteristic way of making money and a characteristic way of losing it. A vendor who will not name the approach, or hides it behind phrases like proprietary AI algorithm, is hiding the failure mode. Our answer, for the record: Grit Markets is Martingale-based recovery, and its failure mode is a sustained adverse trend, which is why this site discusses blow-up risk on the front page rather than in a footnote.
Question two: what is the worst case, in numbers and mechanics? Every strategy has one. The honest vendor can tell you what a catastrophic sequence looks like, what it costs at given settings, and what stands between normal operation and that outcome. Listen for the shape of the answer. It cannot lose is a lie. It has never lost is a backtest talking. The worst case is X, bounded by controls Y and Z, and here is how to size for it is the answer of someone who understands their own product.
Questions 3 and 4: risk controls, and how results are presented
Question three: what risk controls exist, and are they yours to configure? A serious EA exposes an equity stop, position size limits and strategy-appropriate caps, documented well enough that you understand each one before real money is behind it. Be wary of EAs where the safety settings are opaque, hard-coded, or where the marketing quietly encourages you to loosen them for better results. The controls are the product; the equity curve is the by-product.
Question four: how does the vendor present performance? Backtests are legitimate engineering tools and terrible promises. Any simulated result should be labelled as simulated and carry a warning that it does not predict live performance; ours carry exactly that, every time, because it is true: simulated results. Backtests do not predict live performance. Treat unverified account screenshots as decoration, and treat published percentage returns and win rates as claims requiring evidence you will rarely get. A vendor confident in the product does not need to promise you numbers; a vendor promising numbers is telling you where their confidence actually lives.
Questions 5 and 6: the terms, and the company
Question five: what exactly does the subscription buy, and how do you leave? Before paying, you should know how many MT5 accounts one licence covers, what happens to the EA when the subscription lapses, whether cancellation is self-service, and when it takes effect. As a UK or EU consumer buying digital content, you also have statutory cooling-off rights; a vendor's refund page should engage with them rather than pretend they do not exist. Grit Markets is one licence per MT5 account, cancel any time from the dashboard effective at the end of the paid period, with the terms and refund policy published in full on this site.
Question six: who is behind it, and where do they stand legally? A registered company with a named jurisdiction, published terms and a working complaints route can be held to account; an anonymous website with a payment button cannot. Check the company register where one is claimed. Grit Markets is sold by Grit Agility Ltd, registered in Scotland as company SC837399, and our contracts say so with governing law attached. Also confirm what the vendor is not: an EA seller is a software company, not your investment adviser, and any vendor blurring that line is either confused about the law or hoping you are.
Question 7, and how to use the list
Question seven: what happens after you pay? Support quality is invisible on the sales page and decisive six weeks in, when a broker changes margin terms or an update needs installing. Look for documentation you can read before purchase, a stated support channel with a response expectation, and evidence of maintenance, because MT5 builds change and unmaintained EAs quietly rot. A vendor who invests in documentation before the sale generally invests in support after it.
Used together, the seven questions form a filter: strategy named, worst case quantified, controls configurable, results honestly labelled, terms explicit, company identifiable, support real. No answer among them tells you an EA will make money; no honest process can tell you that. What the filter finds is vendors who treat you as a counterparty in an informed agreement rather than a conversion. Hold Grit Markets to every line of it. If we ever fail the checklist we published, you will know exactly what that means, and you will have learned it the cheap way.
Nothing in this article is investment advice. Martingale-based strategies can produce large drawdowns and total loss of capital.