Topic: Aricie: Announcing a new trading bots platform - page 4. (Read 18055 times)

Thank you for all your improvements.  Can you check to see if the platform is down?  Everything was working perfectly but now I have no orders in MtGox.

Hi all,

I have just finished to update the bot platform, trading algorithm and hosting web site, time for a global announcement.

 First about the updates

• The farm now runs smoothly. About 40 user bots are currently scheduled to trade every 5 minutes.
  
  
• The MtGox IP ban problem was fixed with automatically disabling invalid credentials. The bot disables the credentials upon saving and sends an email to the user requiring a password update
  
  
• The previous mentioned bug was found and fixed, trading now performs as expected
  
  
• The algorithm was also updated with improvements and new features, such that the resulting bots now trade smoothly with a self adjusting trading band.
  
  
• The site was updated with a new skin and there is now an illustrated page, which details how the trading works and the various parameters
  
  
• It is still hosted on a quite unreliable server though, with occasional crashes. Hopefully our new web farm will be available soon.
  
  
• A Codeplex project was created and now hosts source code and related downloads

 Our product: Portal Keeper

As I previously stated, my main objective is to evangelize and keep developing our bot platform, so here is a little more about it:


The bot farm is part of a DotNetNuke module, which mainly consists of an IDE in the form of property editors mapped to large xml configuration files, and a rule engine run by an application firewall and the scheduled farm.

Our property editor still has UI issues to fix, yet it is a powerful tool, which allows fine grained configuration.
As an illustration, on the MtGox bot dedicated page, the bot definition editor maps to an entity: Here is what an XML export of that bot looks like. By comparison, the set of editable user parameters on the same page maps to the bot variables, i.e l15-l215 of the bot's export.


If you download and install Portal Keeper on your own DNN instance, you'll have edit access to all of those parameter and will be able to customize your bot in many ways.


For instance, you could add intermediate steps to your trading algorithm, where you parse various web content for additional indicators/entities. As a matter of fact, I've added a new disabled rule in the MtGox bot, which illustrates that kind of scenario. The bot requests http://hidemyass.com/proxy-list/, parses the list of open proxies through XPath queries, and feeds a proxy pool to be used at will on subsequent requests. Of course it wouldn't be a good idea to trade directly over open proxies, but I foresee many other uses for that kind of feature.


Now if you have .Net skills, you should see from browsing the trading material source code that there is virtually no prerequisites to integrating your own class library right into custom bots and the corresponding online editors sections, while staying focused on your own value added features, e.g your custom trading code.  Also, it should be pretty straight forward to add a step to retain a fee out of the user bot profits, using the existing sendbtc apis. If you feel like applying that principle to host an improved commercial version of dnnbitcoin, please do so.


My last reasons for you to try the bot farm on premises rather than relying on our hosted version: additional safety and lower schedule period. I did my best to secure the accounts (user data is compressed and encrypted between each run), but if you’ve got a lot of btcs to trade, please don’t put them into our hands. Setting your own schedule to a higher frequency will also definitely make a difference, though you have to take into account that the exchange sites themselves prove quite unreliable on large ticker moves when most bots activity is concentrated (slow requests, timeouts, unprocessed queues).  

What's next?

In the next weeks, I will:

• Compile a proper documentation for the bot platform. As a reference, here's the current resx file for most existing labels and inline helps. Again, the trading material represent a fraction of it, so there's a lot of writing ahead.
  
  
• Keep fixing bugs and making sure the platform is ready for publication.
   
• Commercialize the final version of PKP for general use within the DNN community.
  
  
• Develop a front-end of Rest-full web services within the firewall engine, fully customizable for custom actions and objects as any other engine rule.
  
  

That means I won't have much time to concentrate on the btc part of the project, and as I believe most technical hurdles for building those trading bots are behind now, I'm looking for contributors here:

• I'm quite happy with the way the bots now generally behave technically, but I'm pretty sure there is plenty room for improvements in reviewing the available parameters and formulas from an financial perspective.
• If you're a .Net developer, the trading source code is simple yet concise with a working mapping from the JSon API objects and an extensible strategy model. Also, the Xml bots themselves could be easily improved with additional features e.g notification emails.

Bounties

I understand everyone here has got to meet ends as we do, so I'm setting up 2 bounties, which I will detail in distinct threads.

• Trading competition. The goal is to come out with the best set of parameters for the current market making bots. Competitors will register their username and bot parameters. By November 1st their balance will be monitored from our website logs, and their parameters frozen for a month. By December 1st their balance will be checked again: the account with the proportionally best profit will be rewarded 50 btcs, and the corresponding parameters will likely become the default configuration.
  
  
• Codeplex bounty. Those willing to contribute will be granted commit access to the Codeplex project. By the end of November, each contributor will be asked to evaluate others contributions to the overall improvements. 50 btcs will be shared between contributors accordingly to the evaluation.
  
  

Public address

Last but not least, we now have a public address and we are accepting donations. I will look into integrating btc payments directly into our DNN store, but the legal situation in France is a bit fuzzy right now, so that won’t be before it gets clarified.
In the mean time, I did earn a couple of btcs on a personal account running our bot (lost a couple of $ though). 10 btcs went to the #operationbitcoin bounty, and  130btcs to our public address. 100 btcs are the reserved prize for the bounties. As an extra incentive and to prove that the 100btcs are not there to stay, where should I send the extra 30 btcs?

Regards,

Jesse
CTO Aricie

Hi,

The platform should be running now.
Sorry for being quiet those days, but my Internet reach is very limited ATM.
Also, the platform was upgraded last week but it still needs a few tweaks, so I did not want to be too voicy before I can finalize that recent work.

That should be next week, and I'll make a proper statement here.

Finally, for all those who registered recently, I'm sorry the recent default strategy parameters don't seem to be so successfull. A fix in the algorithm is already planned, and I'll investigate properly. In the mean time, I suggest you increase the "min order margin" parameter to stop "burning" so much in those numerous orders, which results in transaction fees eating potential gains.


Cheers

When will the platform be back again?

WOOT !!!

Registration is open again...

+1

Is it possible do download the DNN Module anywhere while the registration is closed?
Would realy like to try this out.

Useer

This looks very promising. I'll try it out just as soon as new registrations are allowed

It looks like everything is working now...I see orders in MtGox.  I'm looking forward to the new version!  

Thanks!

Hi,

I just restarted the platform, which may have been idle for a while (that happened quite a few times, independently of the IP ban issue).
Try re-enabling your bot and let me know if you see orders coming.

In the mean time, I'm nearly finished with releasing a new version. I'll keep you informed here.

Cheers

Has the bot been disabled on the MtGox side again?  I've just entered my information, enabled the bot and saved it but I don't see any action on the MtGox side.  Once I save the enabled bot, do I have to do anything else to get it to trade?

Hi,

I'm back to support the platform, and I could restart the MtGox Bot after a couple of user bots with wrong passwords were disabled again.
I'll be working on dealing with wrong credentials detection, adding support for socks proxies and supporting DotNetNuke 6.0 in the next few days.

In the mean time, you can download the DotNetNuke module from the site and run it in your own instance (DNN 4.8.1+/5.X currently supported).
Just make sure to install the shared module first (also available from the website), as it contains required assemblies.

Cheers,

Jesse

any idea on when this is going to be back up? my bot hasnt traded in a week, and now the sites down...any update would be appreciated....

is there a way to run the bot from my own computer so im not relient on your servers?

Well that's a reason why you shouldn't use a Strategy, which leaves your orders uncovered in case of service interruption (There's already a warning about that on our home page).
The default Strategy is fine with that: small orders around market price are covered by bigger orders further away. That kind of non predictive, passive market making strategy is only "breaking" on market moves and does not require any special attention if the trading band orders are slowely cleared with increasingly bigger moves, without being replaced. This Happened to me several times already while testing without any harm.
 Of course it's very different if you get the bot to issue big orders and you want it to pull out at some point.

As for milliseconds, each call to the MtGox API is no shorter than a regular HttpRequest (50 ms at the very minimum) and the fact that the bot itself doesn't need more than a couple of milliseconds for itself doesn't help much.
The access time is very variable, typically slower during market rushs, ExchangeBitcoins was very slow lately, and Mt Gox times several times a day.
You need at the very least 2 calls (Orders+balance and Ticker), and I added a 100ms wait time between 2 calls as TradeHill may consider faster calls as DOS.

Accordingly you should expect a couple of seconds for your bot to run especially if it's issuing several orders (1 API call per new order).

Our bots are programmed to run every minute by default and considering their Strategy, this is fine: most significant market moves span over several minutes, and your're always one trend ahead, replacing currently executed order for the next trend change.
Hope that makes sense.

In the mean time, I did not get any answer from Mt Gox yet (I guess we can resume the Mt Gox connection on Monday), but the site is now full Https.

Well this is probably my last post before Ozora, don't expect from our team too much information on financial matters, rather on the platform itself.

Cheers guys

Jesse

I think the more important question is what happens to your old orders if the bot can't communicate all of a sudden?  What if you had risky orders placed that are now set to lose a lot of money because the market is constantly changing?  I guess you could just log in the MtGox and cancel, but we are relying on millisecond response times here, right?

does this mean no new orders will be made by my bot until the servers IP is unbanned?

Just one last thing before I leave and our support team takes over, about strategies and profit since they might be lost in that area.

The default Strategy isn't too risky, and the main entry points to increase profit/risk are the following:

• Min Order Value (increase for more risks) / Min Order Margin (decrease for more risks): they deal with orders close to the ticker; the first determines the value of min orders relative to max orders, and the second how close you get to the ticker thus the density of low orders considering the exponential pricing distribution 
• The extreme orders (Lowest Bid / Highest Ask). All orders in between are computed relatively to those value (linear in value). For more risks, you can increase their value or reduce the band width, just make sure it does not dry out your reserve.
  

Hope our team will be ok with handling that current pb.
They don't know much about Btc, but they're good DNN programmers, and they should be able to sort out most issues.
They'll contact me for detailed answers if needed.

See ya,

Jesse

Just registered an support ticket with Mt Gox.
I asked if the server's IP can be white-listed, but we'll probably have to implement a ban list of our own to isolate faulty credentials, and to rely in the long term on a private pool of proxies. That was expected anyway.
I'll make sure to implement that before the final release.

In the mean time, I have restarted the service for TradeHill and ExchangeBitcoins bots.

OK I've got a problem now.
The server's IP was banned by Mt Gox because someone's entered a wrong password.
I should have foreseen this coming.

I'll check with MtGox to get the IP unbanned.
I'll re-enable verbose logging so that we can investigate ourself on which account has a problem; til now, I haven't logged the bot dumps, only in each users recent history.
I should precise that the password is dumped with another run of encryption, so we won't see it going through.
That will probably slow the site a bit though by generating heavy Data access.

Now here's a few remarks to get started again:

- The bot uses the legacy API, what's needed as credentials is your regular Mt Gox account username and password. Hopefully the API is here to stay for a while, I'll switch to recent API when I'm back.
- Please check your credentials for those who enabled their bots and did not see any new open order on their Mt Gox account.
Edit: the bots won't not issue unavailable orders. If your account is empty, don't expect to see any order coming.

-Sorry for the others, your account is probably left with orders, no need to worry as those positions should be fine, yet you may still want to clean your account until the IP address is removed from ban list.

Cheers