Not everyone will like aggressive trading, where dozens of transactions are made every day across multiple currency pairs. We can recommend Zeus expert advisor to traders who prefer a quieter style of trading.

All we know about this trading robot is the fact that its author is Chuvashov, a well-known trader. Describing his creation, he does not dwell on the method of market analysis. Therefore, you can only make guesses on the approach this EA uses.

It is known that the bot focuses on stability, so it doesn’t use Martingale, averaging and position locking. The rest of the trading style is familiar – entering in the direction of the trend on a pullback, given the recommended timeframe (last good result was achieved on m15), the bot makes relatively few transactions a year.

We can also mention low requirements for initial deposit. So, the starting capital for cent accounts must be at least $150 (working lot is 0.01). When working on the classic account, minimum deposit must be at least $1,500.

How to prepare Zeus expert advisor for work

This trading robot is freely available, but its setup is somewhat different from simply copying the .ex4 files to the “experts” folder. First, there are different .ex4 files for each currency pair (GBP/USD and EUR/USD), and secondly, you will need to copy the appropriate files to the “libraries” folder.

Difficulties don’t end there: the expert advisor simply refuses to work with default settings, reporting problems with the algorithm in the strategy tester. The problem could only be solved using a set of settings for the EA – files with the .set extension will need to be placed in the “Presets” folder.

As for the EA setting, they are quite standard. A trader can change the following parameters:

• MondayStart/FridayEndHour – start and end time of automated trading. By default, Zeus expert advisor begins trading on Monday at 15:00 and ends trading on Friday at 15:00;
• BrokerGMT – indicates difference between UTC and the time of the broker;
• RiskRange – the range of risks in one transaction is set manually;
• Risk – indicates acceptable risk in the transaction.

Test results

The recommended EUR/USD and GBP/USD currency pairs were used for testing. The EA works only with the use of ready-made settings for m15 timeframe, so tests on other timeframes were not run.

Test results raise a lot of questions. From January to February 2014, profit increased smoothly, no large drawdowns were observed – typical behavior for a cautious EA. After that, 2 triggered SLs in a row zeroed the deposit. Situation is similar for GBP/USD.

At that, the EA author claims that no Martingale is used, and the SL size is always set fixed. If this were true, such large losses would have been simply impossible. Perhaps, in this case, the EA responded incorrectly to the situation on the market, i.e. its algorithm failed.

If you do not take these weird losses into account, the EA figures look good. Due to the fact that the SL is always pulled behind price, the percentage share of profitable trades exceeded 90%.

Testing on other currency pairs

When advertising Zeus expert advisor, the author emphasizes the fact that the bot is constantly being improved, and now trading is not limited to 2 currency pairs. For example, during the period from March 2011 to October 2013, the bot was trading quite well and the profit for the period was more than 200%.

In the meantime, trading was already conducted on h4 timeframe and with not very convenient GBP/JPY currency pair. During this period, only 137 transactions were concluded, but income was $5,556.51 at the initial deposit of $2,000. In this case, the drawdown has not exceeded 25%, while the share of profitable trades was only a bit more than 50%.

Despite the good results, the growth curve of the deposit suggests unstable operation. Instead of a flowing line, a broken curve was observed, clearly showing that the deposit growth occurs abruptly, and most of the time Zeus expert advisor was trading near zero.

It is also suspicious that the test results are provided only before the end of 2013. This suggests that the most successful section in the history was chosen. It is empirically impossible to check if this is true, because settings for each currency pair have "protection" in the expert algorithm.

Summing-up

The author of the trading robot claims that income per month can reach 56%, but this is hard to believe, given the test results of previous versions of the EA. The official website of Chuvashov offers to rent the EA and even guarantees a refund if trading fails.

All this is like trying to swindle into buying an inferior article at any price. As a general rule, if the EA trades really profitably and stably, the authors provide monitoring of the real account, or at least the test results over a long period. In this case, there’s none, except for unsubstantiated figures.

At the same time, testing of previous versions of the bot shows that Zeus expert advisor looks good at certain intervals. Perhaps, it may be really capable of providing a stable deposit growth after improvements.