State of Forex Robots 2026 — a Census of 19,619 MetaTrader Products

**Dataset**: 19,619 active listings from our MQL5 marketplace crawler (collected November 2025 – July 2026 from public listing pages; coverage skews toward ranked/new listings and is not the complete marketplace). Fields analysed: name, developer, category, platform, listed price, and the scraped description text. **Claim and vocabulary statistics are lower bounds** — descriptions are captured truncated, so a listing whose claims appear only deeper in its sales page is not counted.

**What we deliberately excluded**: our own site publishes ~18,000 simulated Strategy-Tester showcase runs for catalog products. None of those numbers appear here — they are illustrative simulations, not tests of vendor code, and aggregating them as 'results' would be fabrication. The live-baseline table below uses only our own broker-API-tracked public accounts, linked so you can inspect every trade. Reproduction script and the raw aggregate dataset are linked under Datasets.

Expert Advisors are the largest single category, but only barely a plurality — the marketplace is nearly as much an indicator bazaar as a robot store. Platform-wise the migration argument is settled: two-thirds of active listings target MT5.

Across the 14,656 listings with a captured price, the median product costs $99 and the median **Expert Advisor** costs $199. The premium tail is real: one in seven paid products asks $500 or more, and nearly a thousand listings price at $1,000+ — a segment where verified evidence should be table stakes, and mostly isn't (see the verification gap below).

757 products (3.9% of the catalog) carry AI vocabulary in their name — 'AI', 'neural', 'machine learning', 'GPT'. The surprise is pricing: the median AI-named paid Expert Advisor costs **$199 — exactly the same as the median non-AI EA**. There is no price premium because the label costs nothing to apply; it is pure attention arbitrage. Our take on when machine learning genuinely earns its keep in a trading system is in the [AI/ML strategy explainer](/strategy/ai-ml).

Gold is the market's gravitational centre — nearly one in four listings references XAUUSD. Grid mechanics appear in 18% of EA texts. The most telling number is martingale: of 1,278 listings that mention the word at all, **40% mention it to deny using it** ('no martingale') — vendors know exactly what buyers fear. Prop-firm targeting (FTMO, FundedNext et al.) is still a small niche at 3.2%, which matches how young the [prop-firm EA category](/prop-firm/best-ea-for-prop-firms) is.

Within the truncated description texts we could scan (every number here is therefore a **lower bound**), explicit win-rate claims have a median of **90%**, six products claim a flat 100%, and 35 use guarantee-style language that no honest vendor can write. Meanwhile the proof vocabulary tells the real story: only **1.2%** of Expert Advisor listings reference any live verification (Myfxbook, verified live accounts, forward tests) while **5.8%** lean on backtests and the strategy tester. The retail robot industry sells simulated evidence roughly **five times more often than live proof** — that is the single most fixable problem in this market, and the reason our own review standard requires public live accounts before performance claims.

For contrast — real, broker-API-tracked public accounts running our own systems, every trade inspectable via the linked reviews. Note what honest numbers look like: win rates of 56–72% (not 90+), profit factors of 1.7–2.7, and drawdowns that are stated, not hidden. If a $199 marketplace listing claims better than this with no live account attached, the burden of proof is theirs.

5,194 developers stand behind the catalog, and the distribution is brutally long-tailed: **49% of developers list exactly one product**, while the top-100 developers (under 2%) supply **24.6%** of all listings. Robot development is a hits business run by a small professional core surrounded by thousands of one-shot attempts — worth remembering when a listing's 'about the developer' section matters to your purchase.