Hard to say what exactly people had in mind while making their selection.
The poll-size is too small to get the exact picture (you would need at least 10x to be sure) but clearly a substantial part of members use automated systems.
The more interesting question is how it correlates with performance and other indicators. However, putting this question in might drastically reduce the number of answers.
Personally, I tend to think that automated systems tend to free their designers from manual labor to creative intellectual labor. Of course, automation comes with its own cost of development and support. Also, some complicated strategies cannot be easily automated and a few very profitable traders might be just very clever 'manual' participants.
I'm a programmer coming up for 40years, messed with some MT4 EA's 10years back, I refuse to waste more time on that as I don't really believe it's possible unless your happy with a very small yearly %, Entries not so hard to code, but at Profit Exits are the real pain to work out logic for, as you don't get to wait for a sign as such to exit.
I count on watching the price stall near a point or show strength before I get in, 5seconds live action, you just can't teach a computer to do that.
That and I've seen to date exactly ZERO systems which are long term profitable.
HFT excluded as there just front running.
