What is catching me off guard is that you are supposed to be using TSL as a function to determine where there is a loss by the average price in a period going up (after a Sell_All_BTC gets triggered). Or did I just read that wrong?
Usually a "crash" is defined as a downward market. If this is the case wouldn't it be extremely profitable to ride the market downhill and at the lowest crossover signal to trigger a Buy_All_BTC?
Or is B-Bot's strategy completely different from what I have described? (I know, I know, "Trends" not "Day Trading")
I've been thinking along the same lines.
The problem with going with "trends" in one hour increments owes to how volatile the BTC market is. Unlike the stock market, where crashes are protracted over days and weeks, crashes on MtGox and BTCE are protracted over minutes and hours.
Those 1 to 2 hours could make all the difference in a crash situation, and the way the bot currently works with thresholds could lead to you losing a lot of money if say the first threshold for a sell is reached when BTC drops from say 90 to 80, its entirely possible that price to crash all the way down to 60 in that next hour or two. So you're looking at a situation where if you had say 10 BTC and a crossover occurred, you could have sold at say 85 when the crash was happening, instead of the 65 that will happen because the bot hasn't hit its thresholds yet.
That's why I proposed the earlier feature that would allow a user to only buy and sell AT crossovers, or at least allow the mix of the two. For example I could see myself wanting to use thresholds in all my buy situations but only wanting to use strictly crossovers in all of my sell situations.
Hi Dresden ,
As Kuroth points out, this is all well and good in theory, but Back Testing continually shows that trading at crossovers is way less profitable than trading at threshold 0.25, 1 hour interval settings. I recall someone posting back testing data of this last week (again, I think it was Kuroth). Gomboo's thread goes into great detail as to why this is is and as to why EMA trading requires longer intervals of time to measure success than say, day trading (where P&L is immediate).
We are working very hard to push out the Back Testing feature for the bot and we are well advanced on it. This feature should take care of this entire debate as you will be able to back test your strategy yourself against all historical data. For now, please believe that the settings we recommend, which are Gomboo's settings, are the best mathematically profitable and proven EMA thresholds out there.
Regarding your point about flash crashes and the need for earlier signal: EMA is designed to be profitable over a longer period of tiem accounting for a few larger wins to profit over a couple of smallish losses hence taking a small loss on a trade is part of the cycle and current settings should make these losses comparatively small to your wins. Again, it's part of the cycle. Altering trigger mechanisms would anull the mathematics behind the bots logic.
Just as a general FYI, we will be looking into incorporating alternative strategy modules (Besides EMA) in the V2-V3 life cycle so that everyone can use a strategy suitable to their risk profile (as EMA is mathematically provable but takes some patience). If anyone has any ideas as to what strategies they would like to see, please let us know .
Pablo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csq7gDnbapI#at=46
Hi PuertoLibre ,
I have added the ADX strategy you suggest to our internal discussion board. When we advance development on our new strategy modules we will be back testing this and other suggested strategies against the Bitcoin market to find the most effective ones. Please be sure to post any other suggestions you may have!
Best,
Pablo.