Topic: Web Based Technical Analysis/Automated Trading Service (Read 3176 times)

I've recently been hired by venture capital to develop another project (one that I will be writing another thread for in the coming weeks). While I'm not shutting the doors to this one (as I've already spent hundreds of hours researching and developing it), I can't continue to spend time on it. This new project is one who's concept I've supported for a long time, but only now have I been given the financial backing to pursue myself. I'm sure many others are working on very similar work, if not identical. The same applies to this trading platform. I'm sorry for letting you guys down, but this platform won't be available for many more months to come. I'm sure others like mine if not much better will be released very soon for you all to make use of. Once again, sorry for the let down.

Please look at bitcoinity.org and bitcoin.clarkmoody.com for UI inpiration. I find the data layouts there extremely usful especially the Buying, Selling, and Time & Sales data provided on the ClarkMooody site.

You're not going to be happy about this....but...

There was never any website (yet). All I had were the standalone bots. If you had asked me only 5 or 4 days ago I would have happily posted some screenshots of those (I really should have in the original post...I feel so stupid for not doing so). This thread was really only meant for suggestions. I was going to go into much more detail about functionality and user interface in another thread when I was closer to launching. I've essentially torn apart all of my bots and, as of 3 days ago, there's basically no GUI to show, only the data structures that I can print through the terminal. If you want to see screenshots of terminal spitting out numbers...I guess I could do that.

I've been hard at work essentially rebuilding from the ground up in order to orient them for web service capabilities/security/speed. I'm looking for a nice GUI package for the website, seeing as my desktop bots were really industrial looking/not very web 2.0 oriented. The tradingview interface looks incredibly user friendly. I need to look into whatever library they're using. Thanks for the heads up man. Sorry I'm letting you down on the screenshots though.

This website https://www.tradingview.com/ just launched real-time Bitcoin analysis https://www.tradingview.com/e/?symbol=MTGOX:BTCUSD# based on MtGox data. As you can see from attached picture users can create custom timeframes like 8 minutes, 9 minutes, etc. It is possible to create renko bars and other non-time resolutions.

It is possible to add drawings, indicators, calculate risk/reward ratios, it is possible to overlay BTCUSD with EURUSD for cross-currency analysis.

Maybe you'll find this website inspirational for your undertaking.

Could you please post some screenshot of your website?

From now on, for convenient reference's sake, I'm going to call the proxy trading platform the "ChaosEngine". Please feel free to recommend better names. I'm not that great with naming things. My first and only dog was named "Spot" lol.

Anyone who wants to be contacted for alpha testing should PM me their contact info. I want to keep the initial testing relatively small, so probably no more than 30 users at first. For beta testing I'll expand it up to 100 users (if there's even enough interest in the first place).

I'm sorry if this is a let down, but I probably won't be able to offer initial user testing for another 2 months. While the bots are fully functional and capable of all the features I outlined, integrating them as web applications is going to be quite an ordeal (despite working on this every day). When I was developing them originally, I had no plans on giving them to anyone, let alone putting them up as web applications. I'm finding myself having to re-code a significant amount of it in order for it to function properly as a web service. I have quite a lot on my plate for the next 5-8 months. I'm finishing undergrad (hopefully my age doesn't diminish my credibility) and applying for PhD programs so that's going to be taking a serious amount of mental energy in and of itself. I can't afford to be sloppy with this project. It needs to be absolutely bulletproof before I set it out into the world.

Thank you for all the support so far. Without the community I would never go through with this. I would just keep my bots to myself and sit on my stash. I'm doing this because Bitcoin has changed my life and I want to give something back to this community. Please continue to provide suggestions. I really appreciate any feedback possible. I'll keep updates coming as promptly as I can.

Also, follow on twitter for updates: @Chaoskampf0

I would also like to be considered for Alpha or Beta testing and would participate in discussion, provide screenshot feedback and perhaps make a screencast-o-matic or two as I have a subscription and I am familiar with making desktop tutorial in SOM.

Keep it up!, your proyect looks really good!

Been watching this thread progress and am certainly very excited to see this come to fruition.   If you are looking for guinea pigs *ahem* testers - more than happy to help and provide input/feedback.  PM me if needed.

I do also like the pay per %profit structure - shows faith from you the developer and for the customer it mitigates the upfront cost of "spending money to make money".

You'll be one of the first to try out alpha testing. Thanks for the continued support and motivation!

stopping by to show some <3 , keep up the hard work bro and cant wait to use the site...hehe my settings FTW I already know :p

Sounds cool so far, especially auto-trading. I think your idea about a 5-7% fee structure of any gains is the best payment model since it proves your belief in your own algorithm/product. Making the charting free for others will eventually generate plenty of more and more "paying" customers. The 1m, 5m, 10m views would be most helpful to see the latest history trend of orders.

I totally agree with you, also the fact that bots does not have emotions is a big advantage. It's just about the advertising for people who don't know a lot about trading.

I will be waiting for your bot and I am curious about the features

I suppose I agree. I still stand by my comment that you quoted. Just because something is abstract doesn't diminish its power as a tool. There's obviously going to be risk involved with any trading. That's the nature of the game. I guess I should be careful about advertising my confidence in my service. I don't mean to imply that it'll take all the risk out of trading, and simply act as a Bitcoin faucet to whoever uses it. That's not the case. There will still be pointy objects that you can still poke yourself with. It will however provide a larger audience with access to more advanced analytical tools for making potentially smarter trades.

I am not trying to bash TA at all, I am writing a TA bot myself to. But I just think you should be careful when you say:


The math is just an abstract model of an idea about how a market behaves. The idea may be pure but the market is not and unexpected things can happen that are not in the idea. Also market conditions change over time.

I do like TA and I use it myself, but you should never see it as a money making machine or something that will 'work 100% of the time' imo. It's just gambling backed by statistical data of the past, there is always risk.

I'm not sure what you're arguing. Are you saying that it's better not to use TA because of the potentiality of an unforeseen black swan situation? Would not using TA put you in a better position during this situation? Would not using TA make the black swan go away/not happen in the first place? If that's what you're arguing, then I have to disagree.

Taleb explains in his book that TA is based around trying to predict the future based on history. Which can work a lot of times but you can never know it for 100% sure. He explains it by this Turkey who is fed everyday for a 1000 days. On the 1001th day the turkey is waiting for his meal as usual when something else happens. How could the turkey have known it was thanksgiving?



No matter how much TA the turkey would have thrown at the chart, he would not have been able to predict this. In this case thanksgiving is a black swan for the turkey. A black swan is something that you can't really predict and is never taken into account in the mathmetical model (else it isn't a black swan). This is more philosophical than it is practical, but Taleb says that if a black swan happens you can easily lose all your profits in a single event.

TA is entirely self-consistent and mathematically pure. In this sense, it works 100% of the time. They're just processed and re-processed numbers. The way you use those numbers is where I think you find the weakest link in efficacy. If by "work" you mean making a profit, then that's purely a function of what you do with this information. You could say the same thing about all charts, and all indicators. Why have charts in the first place? Why do we put volume bars underneath the charts? These processed numbers convey information. They don't have any personal prejudices. They are what they are, and deriving meaning from them is solely the responsibility of the humans looking at them. Here's the weakest link - the human. Some of them can derive more meaning from those numbers than others.

TA tries to detect patterns in a market. I personally believe that markets for altcoins look different and are driven by different forces. This should be backtested though.

I've read the Black Swan by Taleb and its true that TA tries to predict what is going to happen while you can never know this for sure, however there are dangers everywhere: a lot of people on this forum have a lot of bitcoin (which is basically buy and hold, a dangerous strategy when crashes or even black swans can happen), a lot of people have little trust in fiat money (and argue the dangers also apply at the USD for example). So TA may be gambling with a lot of dangers, but it appears that in this crisis almost everything is.


I am just curious by the way. I think so, but it appears there is more and more competition for paid trading services and you have to differentiate somehow. Are you going to evaluate the profit after every buy-sell or on a timely basis?

If TA doesn't work for the major currencies, why do you think it will for crypto ?

And if you think TA works read 'Fooled by randomness' by Taleb

3. Moving Average Convergence-Divergence

This, if only for litecoin, would be a huge leap forward in trading tools. Much like bitcoin.clarkmoody.

I visualize a slider GUI tool for those who like to place their trades by hand with a frequency of trades perhaps 1 every 1-5 days, not a daytrader.

To have some granularity, at any level, for filtering the orderbook would be, for all Crypto trading a giant leap forward. To create algorithms for automated trading based upon orderbook filtering might be a noble goal, but to gain feedback from the use of a broader, more basic orderbook filtering tool might provide data for building an orderbook filtering logic bot. If one can determine what the trader who executes on a longer timescale is looking for in the orderbook, then the development of algorithms to construct an automated bot which derives trading data from the orderbook might be more tangible for coding something more intense for automation.

I'm not totally set on the payment plans, but yes. I think I'll only charge fees on the automated trading service, while the rest of the functionality will be provided free of charge (hopefully people will donate). I'm considering a flat rate on all automated trades that end in a positive gain. I'm thinking anywhere from 5-7% of that respective gain. No profits = no fees. You already have to pay trading fees on the exchanges, so I shouldn't be taking any more of your coins. Does this sound reasonable?

It sounds like an awesome project. Should I take it it wil be a paid service (hence the 'competition')?

Good 

If there's enough push for shorter timeframe scaling, I'll add 1 and 10 minute frames as well.

You can draw whatever arbitrary lines you want. In addition, there are linear regression trend lines (as mentioned above) among other computed trend lines. There's obviously basic volume charting (I didn't think I needed to mention that), apart from advanced volume analysis like on-balance volume (as mentioned above). Any information that's available on BTC-e is already included in the program (last price, high, low, volume, order books)

No Volume?


Including trendlines?


It is a pity. Add at least 1 and 10 minute timeframe.

also, follow on twitter for updates:

@Chaoskampf0

I don't want to publicize the entire functional capacity of the service until right before alpha testing, so that I don't provide competing developers (and there are definitely a wide variety of them, including corporate ones) with any undue inspiration. I'm sorry if this comes off as greedy or non-collaborative, but I've spent almost 4 months writing these algorithms and have been sacrificing my sleep and "free"-time to develop this. Although, I should describe some of the basic functions that are already incorporated into the program, and which any serious competitor will already be familiar with and use. This should give you guys a jumping off point for suggestions.

Current Analytical Functions:

1. Simple Moving Average
2. Exponential Moving Average
3. Moving Average Convergence-Divergence
4. Relative Strength Index
5. Support/Resistance
6. Aroon Oscillator
7. Stochastic Momentum Index
8. Chaikin Volatility
9. Bollinger Bands
10. On-Balance Volume
11. Linear Regression Trend Lines

There's plenty of on-chart drawing ability. As is, the charts only scale down to a 30 minute timeframe. I don't think I'll be making them any finer resolution than that. The upper bound for that scale is all-time data

1. Ability to draw trendlines on a chart. No web service allows users to draw trendlines  

2. Multiple time frames, at least these ones: 1s, 10s, 20s, 30s, 1m, 2m, 3m, 5m, 10m, 15m, 20m, 30m, 45m, 1h, 2h, 3h, 4h, 6h, 8h, 12h, 18h, 1d, 1w, 1q

You both make good points. While implementing this sort of functionality shouldn't be too difficult, figuring out what high/low volume orders are real and which ones are meant purely for manipulation might be a little tricky for the trading bot. Sometimes buy/sell walls are real. Even if they're not, they influence the direction of the market. While I could write a tool that filters down the order-books to a narrow spectrum of volumes, I don't know if I can incorporate it into the trading algorithm. My bots depend on these volume indicators to place their orders (and many different sub-functions within the trading bots use and process that information). If you're not interested in automated trading, then this isn't really an issue. You can just use that tool to filter the order-book and do your own analysis to place your orders by hand. Also, scaling the chart was one of the first features I implemented. I don't understand why that's not a standard feature on all the exchanges (it seems so basic and yet so incredibly useful). Does this address your suggestions or did I miss something?

That makes a perfect sense. When we see a 10,000 coin dump then pump on a $0.20 scale, the $0.01 move becomes very hard to monitor. I like the candle charts more as you can see which one is a sell and which one is a buy candle and how much difference is left out between sell/buy, but if we can get something similar to the charts on MCXnow and btc-e integrated together and make one candle colored orders but with the price separate to the volume, I think we'd have a good chart for the 24 hours period.

BUT, if we have the option to filter bots/micro orders and be able to scale the chart up to 7 days and down to 1 hour, we'd have a GREAT chart.

Some days before the bitcoin 2013 conference we saw Litecoin stabilize neatly around the $3 mark into a channel with a suppressed trading range, very narrow. And we saw this happen on the way up from the last correction to $2.5 levels where very large buy and sell walls were placed on the orderbook at btc-e which effectively obscured and made the bid/ask ratio metric unuseable unless filtered with a dynamic view. These large, moving buy and sell walls were articulated such that the trading ranges were constricted to channels and moved up to consolidate trading ranges sideways at the $3 levels.

One of the tools I find sorely lacking in trading Crypto is an interface to filter out the largest buy walls, or see only the buys/sells that are for example in an 8LTC to 45LTC range, and to examine other ranges of orders on the book might give one a perspective on a more accurate market depth, and market depths in different channels of the orderbook.

When we attempt to use the "short orderbook" on btc-e itself to gauge market depth, volume and movements, often we find the buy and sell walls heavily peppered with automated, high frequency, bot spam orders, or micro-orders. Filtering this out, and removing the largest buy/sell walls, would provide a much more accurate picture of buy/sell interests on the "long orderbook".

When performing statistical analysis, one of the first steps in finding a mean, or an average of course is to throw out the lows and the highs and average the middle values, and then of course there are many other metrics which can be derived from the orderbook. Of all of the tools in Crypto trading I find to be the least utilized it is the orderbook.

I'm in the process of developing a web based technical analysis service for crypto-currencies. It will have normal and automated trading capabilities in addition to advanced charting/analysis tools. As of right now, BTC-e and MtGox are the only exchanges that I've integrated into the platform. More exchange integration is sure to come, although I'm seriously considering dropping Gox support (I want to do my part to undermine its market centralization, however insignificant my impact might be). My bots are basically all written up and feature many high level functions, but I was just wondering what sorts of end-user analysis functionality people would want to see in a service like this. Other suggestions are more than welcome. Feel free to rip apart my idea.