Do I need to know how to trade to use a bot?

The bot handles the part that requires skill in the moment — identifying setups, entering, placing protection, exiting. That genuinely does not require you to know how to do it yourself, in the same way that using a calculator does not require doing long division.

What it does not handle is the decisions around it. Choosing risk per trade, deciding whether the account is large enough for the strategy's stop distances, and deciding whether a 15% decline is a normal drawdown or a broken system are all yours, and getting them wrong destroys accounts running perfectly good strategies.

The single most valuable thing to understand before starting is drawdown. Our validated figure is around 20%, which means a fifth of the account disappearing temporarily is expected behaviour. Someone who does not know that will switch the system off at the bottom, which converts a temporary loss into a permanent one.

The short reading list

Four concepts cover most of it: position sizing, risk per trade, drawdown, and what the broker minimum lot does to small accounts. An hour spent on those is worth more than any amount of chart study for someone running a bot.

The glossary covers the rest in short entries, and the setup guide covers the mechanics.