Risk disclosure
This page explains in more detail the risks behind the short warning at the top of every page.
What this site is
The SmartQA Academy trading section teaches how MetaTrader 5, MQL5 code, backtesting, position-sizing arithmetic and market mechanics work. MetaTrader 5 is a trading platform, and MQL5 is the programming language used to write programs for it. Backtesting means running trading rules on past prices. Position sizing means working out the size of a trade from the amount of money at risk.
Every reader gets the same text, and nothing is written for one person's situation.
The site is independent. It has no business ties to the developer of MetaTrader 5 or to any broker, prop firm or trading-tool vendor. None of them sponsors or endorses it. A prop firm is a company that gives traders an account to trade under the firm's rules, and the account is often a simulated one.
MetaTrader 5 and MQL5 are trademarks of their developer and are named here only to describe the software.
Who reviews the guides
The trading section is run by an individual educator based in Israel, who checks and approves every guide before it is published. This page calls that person the reviewer. The reviewer holds no license from the Israel Securities Authority or from any other financial regulator.
The reviewer is not a broker, an investment adviser, an investment marketer or a portfolio manager. Under Israeli law, an investment marketer is an adviser who has a business link to the products they advise on.
The reviewer does not manage anyone else's money and does not run copy trading, a service that copies one trader's trades into other people's accounts. The reviewer gives no one trading signals (messages that say what to buy or sell, and when) or investment advice, whether free or paid.
The guides never reveal the settings of the reviewer's own trading systems. The reviewer may personally trade instruments that appear in examples, but no guide describes the reviewer's own trades or plans. No one pays for a guide to be written or for what it says.
Drafts are written with AI tools working from cited sources, and the editorial policy explains how each guide is checked and approved.
Education, not advice
Nothing on this site is investment advice, investment marketing or portfolio management, and nothing here is legal, tax or accounting advice. No guide recommends buying, selling or holding any financial instrument, and none of them offers a financial product or invites you to buy one. The guides do not consider your goals, finances, experience or tolerance for loss. We publish no forecasts, price targets or trade ideas.
Some examples show a trading rule, such as a condition for entering or leaving a trade. Others set a maximum spread (the difference between the buy price and the sell price) or the distance to a stop-loss order. A stop-loss order closes a trade when the price reaches a chosen level. These examples use a made-up name such as Instrument A instead of a real market.
Reading the site, joining the waitlist or writing to us does not make you an advisory client of SmartQA Academy or of the reviewer.
Your decisions are your own
You alone decide whether to trade, what to trade and how much to risk, and you are responsible for the results. A guide explains how something works. It is not a reason to act, and your own research comes first.
A provider is a broker or other company that offers trading accounts. Before you open any account, read the provider's own risk warnings, account terms and product documents. Some providers must publish the percentage of their retail (non-professional) client accounts that lose money. If yours does, read that figure too.
If you are unsure whether a product suits you, consider asking a licensed adviser in your country. Reading guides, or finishing a course, does not by itself make anyone ready to trade with real money.
The risk of loss
Trading forex (currencies), CFDs, futures, options and crypto is risky, and many of these products are complex. A CFD (contract for difference) is a contract with a provider. You make or lose money on the change in an asset's price, but you never own the asset itself.
Prices can move sharply and without warning, and no one can predict them reliably. Any method can go through long losing runs, and one that behaved well in the past can stop working when conditions change.
Leverage lets a small deposit control a large position (an open trade). So a modest price move can wipe out much of the deposit in a short time. Leverage makes losses bigger in the same way that it makes gains bigger.
You can lose part or all of the money you put in. Depending on the product, the provider and where your account is held, you can even lose more than that. Use only money you can afford to lose, never money you need for living costs, debts or other commitments.
These products do not suit everyone. Think about your goals, your experience and how large a loss you could bear before you trade at all.
Margin, stop-outs and protections
A leveraged position needs margin: money from your account that the provider sets aside while the position is open, to cover possible losses. The platform shows your margin level: the value of your account, including open profits and losses, compared with the margin in use. Each provider sets a stop-out level, which is a minimum margin level. If losses push your margin level down to it, the provider's system can start closing positions automatically, usually at a loss.
Some regulators require providers to protect retail clients. A provider may have to cap leverage or close positions when margin runs low. It may also have to make sure you cannot lose more than your account balance (negative-balance protection).
Rules vary by country: some regulators require some of these protections, and some require none. Even where they are required, they may not apply to accounts classed as professional, or to accounts held with a provider in another country.
On CFD and forex accounts, the provider is usually the other party to your trades. If the provider goes out of business, the protection for your money depends on the rules where the provider is authorized. It may be small, or there may be none.
In some countries, some products are restricted or not offered to retail clients at all. Check which rules apply to your own account: a general guide cannot tell you what applies where you live.
Costs and execution
You usually pay the spread (the difference between the buy price and the sell price) on each trade. If your account charges a commission, you pay that too. You pay these costs whether the trade wins or loses. They build up fast when you trade often, so frequent short-term trading is especially costly.
On many forex and CFD accounts, an open position pays or receives a swap (a financing amount) at a set time each day. That time is called the rollover time. The swap is often a cost.
An order can be filled (carried out) at a worse price than you expected. This can happen if the price moves while the order is sent (slippage). It can also happen if the price jumps, with no trading in between (a gap).
Sometimes only part of an order is filled. An ordinary stop-loss order does not limit the loss to the stop price if the price jumps past it.
Liquidity is the amount of buying and selling available near the current price. Liquidity can thin out and spreads can widen in fast markets and around economic news releases. This can also happen around the rollover time, and when a market reopens after a weekend or holiday.
In MetaTrader 5, each symbol (the platform's name for a tradable instrument) has a minimum trade size, called its minimum volume. A trade size can only change in fixed steps, called the volume step. On a small account, even the smallest allowed trade can risk more than your plan allows.
Technology risk
Trading depends on software, connections and servers, and any of them can fail. In MetaTrader 5, the terminal is the program you trade from. A VPS is a rented server that can keep a terminal running all the time.
A lost connection, a frozen terminal, a stopped VPS, a platform update or an outage at the provider can stop you from closing a position. Any of these can also stop an expert advisor (a program that trades automatically) that you think is running.
An expert advisor copied to a VPS can keep trading after you change or remove it in your own terminal. If both copies are switched on, it can also trade twice.
Charts and candles (the bars that show each period's prices) follow the provider's server time, which often differs from your local time. So daily candles and time-based code may not line up with your own clock. This also applies to trading sessions (the main trading hours of a financial center, such as London or New York).
Hypothetical, backtested and simulated results
Our editorial rules put backtests, simulations and worked examples in a box labeled hypothetical or illustrative, like the one below. Each box carries a warning about the limits of such figures. The rules also require each box to state the assumptions behind its numbers. For a backtest, these include the price data and test period, spread, commission, swap, slippage and position sizing.
Hypothetical example
The figures in this box are hypothetical. No real trading account produced them, and no money was at risk. They come from a backtest (a test of trading rules on past prices), a simulation, or a worked example (a calculation with made-up numbers). Backtests and simulations are built with hindsight (after the prices are already known), so they can make a method look better than it is. Figures like these have built-in limits. They may leave out or misjudge real costs and conditions. These include spreads that change, commissions, swaps, orders filled at worse prices or only in part, price gaps, and times when few people are trading. The figures also cannot show how anyone would cope with real losses or keep to a plan under pressure. Real results can be very different, and real losses can be larger. We do not claim that any account will get results like these, or that such results are likely.
With a $10,000 demo balance and a rule of risking 1% per trade, the planned loss on one trade is $100. Gaps and slippage can make the actual loss larger.
We publish no real account results, profit screenshots, testimonials or income claims. Even real past results would not be a reliable guide to future results.
Backtests and the Strategy Tester
The Strategy Tester is the MetaTrader 5 tool that runs an expert advisor on past prices. Its report is only as good as its inputs.
Results depend on the modeling mode. This is how the tester rebuilds price movement, for example from real recorded ticks (single price changes) or from generated ones. Results also depend on the quality and completeness of the price history, and on the provider's symbol settings, which differ between providers and change over time.
A test includes only the costs and execution conditions that its data and settings contain. So it can miss changing spreads, requotes (when the provider offers a new price instead of filling the order), partial fills and thin liquidity.
Optimization runs the test many times with different settings and picks the ones that fit past data best. This can produce a method that only fits random ups and downs in that data (overfitting) and fails on new data. Testing it on a separate stretch of data that the optimization did not use (an out-of-sample test) helps, but it does not remove that risk. An attractive report shows how a set of rules behaved on one stretch of history, not what will happen next.
Demo accounts
A demo account is a practice account that trades with virtual money, and every code example on this site is meant for demo accounts only. Conditions on a demo account may not match those on a live (real-money) account. Fills, slippage, spreads, execution speed and available symbols can differ.
With no real money at stake, there is also much less of the pressure that changes how people trade. Good results on a demo account do not show that a method will work with real money.
Code examples
Code on this site is short teaching material, not a complete trading system, and it has not been tested for live trading. Examples include MQL5 expert advisors, scripts (programs that run once) and indicators (programs that show calculations on a chart).
This code comes as is, with no warranty of any kind. It may contain errors or not work as intended. It may also behave differently on your version of the terminal, your account type or your symbol settings, or stop working after a platform update.
Read and understand every line before you compile it (turn it into a program the terminal can run), and run it only on a demo account. The terminal has an algorithmic trading setting that lets programs trade. When it is on, an expert advisor can place orders on whichever account the terminal is logged into, including a live (real-money) account. Before you attach an expert advisor to a chart, check which account is logged in.
You use any code at your own risk.
Psychology and wellbeing
Losing money, and the pressure of trading with real money, can affect judgment, sleep and relationships. Plans and journals can help you see your own decisions more clearly, but they do not remove market risk. If trading is hurting your finances, your health or the people around you, take a break and talk to someone you trust or to a qualified professional.
Accuracy and updates
Every guide is checked against its cited sources before it is published, but mistakes can remain, and platforms, documentation and rules change. Each guide shows when it was published or last updated. Symbols, their settings and prices in examples are for illustration and may not match any provider's current settings.
The content is provided as is, with no promise that it is complete, accurate or current. If you find an error, please tell us through the contact page.
This page may change too. The date at the top shows the current version.
Limitation of liability
As far as the law allows, SmartQA Academy and the reviewer are not responsible for any loss or damage from using or relying on this site. The same applies to its code examples and the sites it links to. This includes lost profits and indirect losses. Nothing here limits any responsibility that the law says cannot be limited.
Advertising and money
The site may earn money from ads. When ads appear, Google chooses them and shows them. The reviewer does not choose them. An ad is not an endorsement or a recommendation, and it is not part of the guide next to it.
SmartQA Academy is also building courses of its own, and the waitlist link after each guide is for a trading course it is preparing. That link is our own promotion, not an ad for anyone else.
We do not name, rate, compare or link to brokers or prop firms. This site has no affiliate links, which pay a site when a reader signs up or buys through them. It also has no sponsored posts, referral payments or paid partnerships with brokers, prop firms, trading-platform developers or trading-tool vendors. If that ever changes, the page with the link or post will say so clearly, right next to it.
Scams and impersonation
SmartQA Academy will never ask for the login details or passwords of your trading or broker accounts. We never offer to manage money or copy trades, and never contact readers with signals or investment opportunities. Anyone who does this in our name is not us. Please report it through the contact page.
Before you deal with a provider, or with anyone who offers to advise you or trade for you, check whether a financial regulator has authorized them. Also check whether they may offer their services where you live. Many regulators keep public lists of authorized firms, and some also list firms that are not authorized.
Who the site is for
The trading section is meant for adults aged 18 or over. It is not meant for anyone in a country where publishing or using it is restricted or unlawful. The rules that apply to you depend on where you live.
See also the disclaimer.