Forex Scalper EA Verification Checklist for MT4

You searched for a free forex scalper EA for MT4 download. That makes sense. Scalping is fast, the robots look slick, and many of them cost nothing to download. But a free file and a trustworthy file are not the same thing. This page does not rank robots for you, and it does not name a winner. Instead, it gives you a checklist to run on any scalper EA before you trust it with real money, whether the robot is free, cheap or expensive.

Read this guide as a method. The method works on a robot from a stranger, a robot from a famous seller, and a robot from us. You will learn what to look for, which numbers matter, and which answers should make you slow down.

Why does a free scalper EA look so convincing?

Open almost any EA listing and you see the same three things. An equity curve that climbs. A win rate near the top of the page. A price, often zero or close to it. Each one is easy to produce and hard to read on its own. An equity curve can be built from a short, friendly period. A win rate tells you nothing about how large the losses were. And a free price tells you what you pay today, not what the robot costs you when the market turns against it.

Scalping makes the problem worse. A scalper opens and closes many trades in a short time, so the list of results grows fast. A long list looks impressive, but length is not proof. A robot that wins many small trades and loses one large trade can show a smooth chart right up until the large trade arrives. Beginners often read the chart and miss the loss hidden in the average trade size.

Wanting a good tool is not a mistake. The mistake is skipping the step where you check the claims. Most of the damage in automated trading happens to people who never asked for evidence, because the evidence was not in front of them and they did not know what to request.

A short story about a Friday afternoon that went wrong

Picture a trader we will call Sam. This is a hypothetical example, built to show a pattern that appears often. It is not a report about a real person.

Sam found a free scalper EA in a forum thread full of happy comments. The thread looked lively and the posts sounded sure of themselves. On Friday afternoon, Sam installed the robot on a live account, because the chart looked calm and the listing showed a high win rate. Sam did not check where the results came from. Sam did not look at the lot size. Sam did not read anything about how the robot behaved during news releases.

By Monday morning, the account was down further than Sam had ever planned to risk in a month. The EA had kept opening trades while spreads were wide. The lot size had grown after a run of losses, which Sam only noticed when reading the history on Sunday night. There was no written loss limit, so nothing stopped the damage until the account was nearly empty.

Nothing about this story is unusual. Versions of it happen every week. The robot may not have been a scam at all. It may simply have been a strategy built for one market condition and then sold with no evidence about which conditions it could survive. The lesson is the same either way. A short checklist, filled in before the Friday afternoon install, would have raised most of the warning signs in time.

What is the EA Verification Checklist and how does it work?

The solution is simple in concept. Before you run any EA on a live account, you check its claims against evidence you can verify yourself. You do not need a finance degree to do this. You need a printed checklist, a demo account and the patience to read a few tables.

The EA Verification Checklist, offered as a free download on this page, is built around one idea: a claim you cannot check is marketing, not information. It has three numbered parts. Part one looks at the track record. Part two looks at the risk numbers that matter most. Part three lists the questions you should put to the vendor. Each row has a space for evidence, and a blank row means the robot has not earned that part of its price.

The checklist is designed to be used slowly. Do not try to complete it in five minutes. Open the tracker in one window, the vendor page in another, and your notes in a third. Work through one row at a time, write down what you found, and only then move on. The goal is a clear record of what was proven and what was not.

You can use the same sheet for any robot. Keep one copy per EA so you can compare several side by side. Over time you will notice that the robots with the most evidence are rarely the ones with the loudest sales pages.

Does the track record come from an independent source?

Start with the results, because the results are where most sales pages try hardest. The checklist asks five questions about the track record. Answer each one in writing before you go on.

The first question is where the results come from. The results link should go to an independent tracker such as Myfxbook or FX Blue. A screenshot is not evidence, because it can be edited, cropped or taken from a different account. A page the vendor controls is not independent evidence either, because the vendor chooses what appears on it. If the only proof is a picture, treat the claim as unverified and write that in the evidence column.

The second question is whether the account is fully verified. A good tracker shows two separate checks: one for the track record and one for the trading privileges. The checklist treats them as separate proof. One without the other proves half as much. Read the tracker’s own wording, because the labels can differ from one site to another.

The third question is whether the account trades real money, or whether the listing says plainly that it is a demo. Demo results are rehearsal, not evidence. A demo can still teach you how the robot behaves, but it does not show what happens with live spreads, live slippage and live emotions. Do not mix the two in your notes.

The fourth question is whether the history is open. You should be able to see closed trades, not a summary hidden behind a custom date range. Watch for date ranges that start conveniently after a bad stretch. Ask yourself why the history begins where it does, and write down the start date you see on the tracker.

The fifth question is whether the record is longer than six months and includes at least one bad month. A curve with no bad month is often a curve with hidden months. Real strategies have losing stretches, because markets change. If you cannot find a losing month anywhere in the record, do not assume the robot is perfect. Assume something is missing from the picture and ask the vendor where it went.

Which risk numbers should you read before anything else?

A profit chart shows you the reward. It does not show the pain you would have to sit through to collect it. The second part of the checklist turns five risk numbers into a table you can fill in. Read them before you look at the total return, because the return means little without them.

Number	Where to find it	What you want to see
Maximum drawdown	Tracker’s equity (not balance) curve	A figure you could personally sit through, stated in money on your account size
Drawdown duration	Longest peak-to-recovery stretch	Weeks you can tolerate, not months you cannot
Average loss vs average win	Trade statistics	If losses are 3 times wins, the win rate must be very high. Do the arithmetic
Worst single day	Daily history	Smaller than your written daily loss limit
Lot sizing pattern	Open trades and history	Fixed or percentage based. Increasing lots after losses is martingale

Start with maximum drawdown. Measure it on the equity curve, not the balance curve, because equity includes losses on trades that are still open. Then convert the percentage into money on your own account. A 20 percent drawdown on a 500 account is 100 currency units. The same 20 percent on a 5,000 account is 1,000 units. The percentage is identical, but the feeling in your stomach is not. Ask yourself honestly whether you could watch that number grow without switching the robot off.

Next, look at drawdown duration. Find the longest stretch from a peak to the point where the account recovered. A drawdown that lasts a few weeks may be survivable for some traders. A drawdown that lasts many months can wear down even a patient person, and it can stop you from switching off a robot that is no longer working.

Then compare average loss with average win. This pair often hides the real problem. Suppose the average loss is three times the average win. To break even before spreads and commissions, the robot would need to win roughly three trades out of every four. Scalpers that win often can still lose money if each loss is much bigger than each win. Do the sum yourself on paper. Do not trust anyone else’s version of it.

Check the worst single day against your own written daily loss limit. If the worst day in the history is larger than the limit you planned, then your limit was never real. Either the robot needs to be sized down, or the limit needs to be honest about what the robot does.

Finally, look at how lot sizes change. Fixed lots and percentage based lots are the two common patterns, and both are easy to understand. If lots increase after losses, the robot is using a martingale style of recovery, whatever name the sales page gives it. Write the pattern you see in the evidence column, even if you are not sure what it means yet. Section six explains it in more detail.

How do you tell martingale from ordinary lot sizing?

Lot sizing is one of the most important parts of any scalper EA, and it is one of the least discussed on sales pages. Ordinary lot sizing keeps the trade size steady or ties it to a percentage of the account. Martingale does the opposite. It doubles or increases the lot after a loss, so that one win is supposed to recover all the earlier losses.

Martingale can look smooth for a long time. Many small wins build a pleasant curve, and the robot seems to recover quickly from each dip. The danger hides in the rare run of losses that a steady win rate eventually produces. When that run arrives, the lot size has already grown, and the account can take a large hit in a short time. The same logic applies to grid systems and to averaging down, which add trades into a losing position rather than closing it.

Here is how to check the history. Open the trade list in the tracker and look at the size of trades after a loss. If the next trade is larger than the last one, and this happens repeatedly, you have found a martingale pattern. Compare the size of the first trade in a run with the size of the trade after the third loss. The difference tells you a great deal.

Now look at what the vendor says. A vendor who claims the robot never doubles the lot, while the history clearly shows doubling, is giving you a contradiction. Believe the history over the sales copy. If the vendor explains the difference well and in writing, you still have a decision to make, but at least you know what you are deciding about.

Some traders accept martingale or grid methods because they understand the risk and size the account to match it. That is a personal choice. The checklist does not tell you to avoid these methods. It asks you to name them clearly, write down what you found, and price the risk in money before you start.

What should you ask the vendor before you pay?

The third part of the checklist is a set of questions for the vendor. Send them in writing, not only in a chat window where replies disappear. Save every answer. A written reply is also easier to compare with the tracker later.

The first question is whether the robot uses martingale, grid, hedging or averaging down. A refusal to answer is an answer in itself. Vendors with a clear strategy usually explain it without fuss, because the method is part of what they sell.

The second question is which market condition hurts the robot most. Trend, range, news, low volatility, high spreads: every real strategy has a weak spot. A vendor who says the robot has none is either unaware of its own design or hoping you will not ask. Write down the answer and compare it with what you see in the drawdown periods on the tracker.

The third question is which currency pairs and timeframes the robot was developed on, and what happens outside them. A scalper built for one pair in one session may behave very differently on another pair during a quiet hour. Ask whether the vendor tested the robot on other pairs, and whether those results are visible on an independent tracker.

The fourth question is about the refund policy. Ask for it in writing, and read the exact conditions, including the time limit and any fees. Then ask whether anyone you can find has actually received a refund. A policy that exists only on paper is worth less than one that customers have used. Search the public forums, but treat anonymous posts with caution and look for specifics you can verify.

Keep your questions short and specific. Vague replies such as “it is a very safe system” do not answer anything. Ask again, and note in the evidence column that the question has not been answered clearly.

How do you test an EA on a demo account first?

Verification on paper is only the first step. The checklist assumes you will test the robot on a demo account before you risk real money. This step is not optional, and it is where your written notes meet real market behavior.

Open a demo account with a broker that offers MetaTrader 4. Attach the EA to a chart in the usual way, make sure AutoTrading is enabled, and set the inputs exactly as the vendor describes. Write down every setting you changed. If you change the settings during the test, you have started a new test, and you should note that in your log.

Run the EA for a fixed period that you choose before you start. Keep a log of every trade. Record the date, the pair, the lot size, the result and any notes about spreads or news. Compare the demo results with the numbers you wrote on your checklist, especially the drawdown, the worst day and the lot pattern. If the demo behaves very differently from the tracker, stop and investigate before you go further.

The MT4 Strategy Tester can help with a different job. It replays historical data so you can see how a set of inputs would have behaved in the past. The official MetaTrader help explains how to set it up. Use it to confirm that the robot runs, that the inputs make sense and that the trade logic matches the vendor’s description. Do not use it as proof of future performance. Backtests on old data can be tuned to look excellent, and a strong backtest is not the same as a forward test on fresh data.

If your EA will not load, or it throws errors when you attach it, do not guess at the cause. Work through the steps in how to fix compile errors in MQL4, complete step-by-step guide. If the robot worked before an update and now stops, see why an MT4 EA stops working after an update and how to fix it.

How do stop-loss rules and spreads fit into the check?

The checklist focuses on evidence, but a scalper EA is only as good as its trade rules. Two rules matter a great deal: how the robot sets stops and how it handles spreads. Neither appears on the printed sheet as a separate row, but both show up in the drawdown and worst-day numbers, which the sheet does cover.

Many scalper EAs use fixed pip distances for stops and targets. A fixed distance can work in a calm session and fail badly in a fast one, because the same number of pips means something different when volatility changes. Ask the vendor how the stop distance is chosen. If the answer is a fixed number, test it on a demo account during both quiet and busy hours, and record how often the stop is hit.

Some traders size stops using volatility measures instead, so that the distance adapts to recent price movement. A guide to the best ATR multiplier for stop loss explains one way to think about that approach. The checklist does not endorse a particular multiplier. It asks you to confirm that the vendor states its stop logic at all, and that the logic is visible in the trade history.

Spreads deserve the same attention. A scalper that trades when spreads widen can lose its edge in a few minutes, especially around news. Check the demo log for trades opened during wide spreads. If the robot keeps trading in those moments, note it in your evidence column. A good vendor should be able to tell you the maximum spread the robot accepts, and whether that limit is an input you can change.

Where do prop firm rules and independent results fit?

Some traders want to use a scalper EA on a prop firm challenge. This adds a layer of rules on top of the checklist. Prop firms often set strict daily and overall drawdown limits, and a robot that is acceptable on a personal account can break those limits in one bad session. Before you use any EA in a challenge, read the firm’s rules in full and compare them with the drawdown numbers you recorded.

The guide to the best EA for prop firm challenge passing covers that topic in more depth. Read it after you finish the checklist, so you already know how to judge the robot’s evidence before you check its fit with a firm’s rules.

Independent results are the other side of the same coin. A tracker that you can open yourself is far more useful than a number on a sales page. For a closer look at how to filter for trackers that show verified accounts and open history, see the best forex robot with independent Myfxbook results. That guide is about finding evidence, while this checklist is about judging it once you have found it.

If you want a worked example of reading one specific EA review, the Alfa Scalper EA review shows how a review can be structured around questions like the ones in this checklist. Use it as a reading exercise, not as a verdict on whether any robot is right for you.

What this checklist does not do

This section matters as much as the rest of the guide. The checklist is useful because it has clear limits. Read these limits before you rely on the sheet.

It does not prove that a strategy works. A complete sheet shows only that the vendor supplied checkable evidence and that the risk numbers are readable. It does not tell you that the robot will make money next month, next quarter or next year. No sheet can predict future results, because markets change and past behavior is not a promise.

It does not replace a demo test. The checklist asks you to test on a demo account before any live trading. Skipping that step means you are making a decision based on a sales page and a tracker, with no experience of how the robot behaves on your broker, your platform and your computer.

It does not review the code. The checklist works on the outside of the product: the evidence, the risk numbers and the vendor’s answers. It does not inspect the file for hidden behavior, and it does not confirm that the robot does exactly what the vendor describes in every condition. A demo test and the written notes you keep are the closest tools you have to that check.

It does not recommend a broker, a platform or a specific robot. Any EA you test should be judged on its own evidence. A row that is filled in for one robot tells you nothing about another.

It is not financial advice. The checklist does not know your income, your goals, your tolerance for loss or your tax position. Trading forex and CFDs carries a high risk of loss, and most retail accounts lose money. Only trade with money you can afford to lose.

How do you handle a blank row?

A blank row is useful information. It tells you that the vendor did not supply evidence for that point, or that the evidence you found was not good enough to count. Do not fill the gap with hope. Mark the row as unverified and decide what that means for you.

The sheet uses a simple rule: price your decision on the evidence column. If a row is blank, the robot has not earned that part of its price. You can still choose to test the robot on a demo account, but you should not pay for it or fund it until the missing evidence arrives.

Do not argue yourself out of a blank row. Traders often tell themselves that one missing row does not matter, because the rest of the sheet looks good. Yet the missing row is often the one that reveals how the robot behaves in a bad month. Ask the vendor for the evidence again, in writing. If the answer is still unclear, keep looking or walk away. There will always be another robot to review.

Keep the completed sheet for each EA you consider. When you revisit a robot after a few months, compare the new tracker data with your old notes. Changes in drawdown or lot pattern are worth investigating before you add money.

Download the checklist and start with one EA this week

Use the download card on this page to get the EA Verification Checklist. Print it, or keep the PDF open while you work. Choose one EA you are already considering, and run the checklist on it from start to finish. Do not rush. Fill in every row, and mark any row you cannot verify.

Before you attach anything to a chart, write down your daily loss limit and your overall loss limit. Keep those numbers somewhere you will see them every day. Then move the EA to a demo account and log every trade for the period you chose at the start. Compare what happens with the numbers on your sheet.

When the sheet is complete and the demo results match the evidence, you can decide what to do next with a clearer head. When the sheet still has blank rows, keep looking. Either way, you will have made the decision with evidence rather than with a sales page.

Start small, stay honest about your losses and treat every claim as something to check. That is the whole method.