A fair question to ask of any company that publishes numbers like ours: what are you actually doing here, and how do you get paid? This page answers both, in plain terms, before you have to ask.
Who is behind this
TOKYO-EA is the work of a software developer based in Tokyo, Japan. The order of the work has been the same throughout: publish trading information in Japanese, build Expert Advisors, run them on live accounts, and publish what they did. The Japanese site, tokyo-ea.jp, has been running that way for years and is still the main body of work; this English section is newer and smaller, and it is being built the same way.
The name is not decoration. Tokyo is where the work is done, and it is a claim about how the software is built rather than about how much it earns: tested exhaustively, documented, and shipped only when the record can be published in full.
The current system is the second generation. The first was a single-engine version whose record — including the year it lost money — is still published and still downloadable. Replacing a product is not a reason to delete the evidence from before the replacement, and both generations sit on the same page.
How the business makes money
In our relationship with you, we sell software. That is the entire commercial relationship, and it is worth stating precisely because so much of this industry is coy about it:
- The software is distributed through the MQL5 marketplace, which is operated by MetaQuotes, the company that makes MetaTrader. Payment, delivery and reviews all happen there.
- We never hold your money. There is no deposit to us, no wallet, no “managed account”. Your trading capital stays in your own account, in your own name, and you can withdraw it without asking us.
- Nobody is paid to bring you here. There is no referral or affiliate reward attached to this software or to these pages. If a trading product pays you for introducing friends, its growth depends on recruitment rather than on the product working — a structure worth being careful with.
What this means in practice: our incentive is for the software to keep working long enough that you would recommend it without being paid to. It is a slower business model than the alternatives, and a considerably more boring one.
What we are not
TOKYO-EA is a software developer. We are not an investment adviser, not a broker, not a fund manager, and not a regulated financial institution in Kenya or anywhere else. Nothing on this site is a personal recommendation, and we cannot tell you what to do with your money — we do not know your circumstances, and we are not licensed to.
We are saying this openly rather than leaving you to discover it. Anyone in this market who has been paying attention checks the regulatory status of a company first, and the honest answer here is that our status is “software vendor”. The trading itself happens in your account, at a broker you choose and can verify for yourself. Kenya's Capital Markets Authority publishes a register of licensed firms; whoever you deal with, check them against it yourself rather than taking anyone's word — including ours.
Because we cannot offer you regulatory comfort, we offer the only other thing worth having: the complete record, including the parts that are unflattering.
Why we publish everything
The default in this industry is to publish the good year and lose the bad one. We publish the losing year, the drawdown table, the settings at which the software fails, and the original test files that let you check whether the summary matches the data. It costs us sales — a certain kind of buyer wants a bigger number and goes elsewhere to find one.
We think that trade is correct. The people we want to work with are the ones who intend to verify before they trust, and there is only one way to serve them: hand over the evidence and get out of the way.