There is certainly alot of money to be made in the foreign exchange markets, and many people enjoy this profession because it is now possible to trade this large market from the comfort of your own home using only a high-speed internet connection.

Forex trading also requires a large amount of time, and if you are trading actively then you can probably expect to spend 1-2 hours each day before you begin your trading by looking over the day's pending economic data, identifying important support and resistance levels, and determining where (or even if) you are going to enter the market and place you stop-loss and profit targets.

Some people are put off by this notion, because they may also have a day job and do not have the necessary time to devote to active trading. If this is your case, or maybe you simply want to find a way to generate income that does not require so many hours every day, then you may want to consider an automated trading system.

Let's start with automated forex trading or autotrading, which can actually be fun if you are the kind of person the plays around with computer programs. There are a few major forex trading platforms, such as Metatrader or Tradestation, that will accomodate small pieces of code that define a set of trading rules. A few of the things that this code will tell your trading platform are when it should enter the market, how to determine whether it is best to buy or sell, how long it should stay in the market for, and how it should decide when to exit the market. You can also specify which currency pairs you want to trade and at what times of the day the trading signals should be acknowledged or ignored.

With the Metatrader platform, the automated software programs that will do your trading for you are called Expert Advisors. Many companies and individual traders alike develop programs like these, and you can find many available on the internet for free. If you want to see a video example of an expert advisor in action, click here.

If this sounds complicated, it can be made much simpler by finding some of the autotrading programs that are already created and simply downloading them. Both Tradestation and Metatrader have large development groups of traders that create these kinds of forex autotrading programs, and you can find many that are available for free as well as some premium autotrading programs that you may need to purchase.

Many forex traders, especially those that do not have a large amount of time to devote to their trading, enjoy designing and using autotrading systems because they can reap recurring benefits from the time that they devote to develpoing those systems. To understand this, let's say that you are trading actively and you spend two hours every day analyzing your trades. From these two hours, let's say that you make an average of ten pips every day.

If you want to continue to make these pips every day, you are going to need to devote another two hours. This means that you spend time analyzing the market, and then you get paid once for your efforts. When it comes to automated forex, however, the story is a bit different. Instead of spending your time analyzing the market and looking for trading opportunities, you will spend your time devising a trading system with entry and exit parameters that can be consistently profitable. You are not going to see many immediate benefits from this over the first few weeks, but once you can create and autopilot forex trading system that can be profitable on its own, you can put it in place and walk away from it while it continues to trade on your behalf.