metatrader and mql, page-3

Yep, I've been researching this for quite a while!

MetaTrader is a Russian company, hence the dominance of Russians using the software. You'll also come across a lot of Indonesians using the software too, for reasons that are less clear to me.

The platform is widely used by overseas brokers all around the world, but it has been associated with dodgy brokers who have gone bust taking all their client funds with them, and also with dodgy broker practices such as manipulating the price feed (spread widening, stop loss hunting, failing to fill orders at the requested price and requoting at much less favourable prices). Some of these brokers even ban you as a client if you are a successful trader, because they only want the 95% of traders who lose money (the brokers make money out of the losing traders by trading against them - taking the opposite side of the trade).

Not all brokers are as bad as each other, some are OK, so take a lot of time to research brokers before chosing one to risk sending real money to. Go to www.forexpeacearmy.com for extensive user reviews of most of the brokers out there.

As to the automated trading... after researching this for over a year I'm pretty confident that there is no holy grail. If there was, everyone would just use one of these things to become insanely rich, but I have yet to come across anyone who has made even decent money from using one.

Some perform well for a period of time, then market conditions change (as they do constantly) and suddenly they start losing money and never return to profitability.

The best systems I have come across work quite well, but still require a level of manual intervention to maintain performance. This might involve deciding when not to use it, manually canceling orders or closing positions, or changing settings as market trend changes.

Here is a forum of people testing commercial and non-commercial systems. They are forward testing the programs on demo and live accounts and reporting the results. A number of systems with potential have been identified, while others have been discarded, so it is a good starting point:
http://www.facebook.com/board.php?uid=6457269717

If you are interested in programming your own system, here are some boards of like-minded developers who are generally happy to share their knowledge and help you out with programming issues:
http://www.forex-tsd.com
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/MetaTrader_Experts_and_Indicators/