Topic: Wouldn't it be nice... (the LazyWhale algorithm) - page 4. (Read 24722 times)

Point #2 is exactly what I was missing until recently. It dawned on me now that there are two ways to go against losses in principle, not entering the losing trade at all (which is what I "forced" until now), or being more permissive on both entries and exits, but aiming to minimize the losses in the bad cases. So far, my solution to the "Don't sell too early during a bubble" problem was restricting sells by a  longer term filter on the mid term momentum signal, but this wasn't a good idea I realize now. Better to allow a somewhat larger number of trades in total, some of which are highly profitable, and some of which are slightly unprofitable, than to go out of your way to prevent the unprofitable trades.

Yeah I agree with that too. In fact I feel I was foolish (I could blame bad luck, but luck is what you make it!) for not taking more decisive action when I first heard about it (nearly set up a CPU miner when you could still CPU mine! but I got distracted and did not come back 'til it was ~$1)

Hell, the argument that we got "lucky" to find bitcoin earlier than most doesn't even hold up. We didn't hear about it from a tv commercial or a poster somewhere. In my case, it was because I was busy reading about a bunch of other stuff (that happens to be related to bitcoin in various ways). I bet the same is true for many. Simply put, the reason most people don't know about bitcoin and the profits to be made is because they are not interested enough in new knowledge.

In a hypothetical run up to $10k, people often cite "It doesn't matter if you bought at 300 or 400" and to some degree they are right.

If you bought $1200 of BTC, you end up with $40k or $30k.

Now some people (greed) will lament the $10k they "lost" not catching the bottom, instead of the $28,800 profit they actually made. Anyone lamenting a 24 bagger needs to have a word with themselves, imho. Prior lamentation of this (greed) will cause them to keep waiting, well past the bottom, because they are convinced its going much lower. The longer and higher the run up goes without them relenting the steeper the price they eventually have to pay to get in. Lets say they are shrewd enough to realise that once we hit $900, we probably are on track to bust through the last ATH and do another run up.

So they manage to get in with their $800 for 1.5 BTC They still end up with $15k

All of this is what people think, regularly. What it doesn't take into account, is that once you caught the bottom. To get those theoretical gains, you ave to also time the top. Which is subject to the same forces of fear and greed.

Now if you alone are the "one" that can pick the bottom at $300 and the top at $10k, then you can turn your $1200 into $40k. Never look back and live a happy life.

If you are a typical guy that is too late at the bottom, and have to panic buy on the way up at $800. Then you are too greedy at the top, ride the crash and end up panic selling at 60% discount. You can enjoy turning your $1200 int $9k. A 7 bagger is pretty cool, but those "losses" not having bought at the real bottom and the real top are going to wrankle you. All you'll think about when you are spending your $7800 profit, is those other guys that got lucky and how its so unfair that you never make it out like those other guys.

Thats because you are thinking about dollars whilst looking at the future of money.

I say again don't bet the farm, but please don't be 'trading' like you think you are some kind of Gordon Gecko. You are just a guy(girl) OTI that is lucky enough to have discovered a massive opportunity.

You can try and use it to make a quick buck. Or you can think about how the future might pan out, and what you need to do to make sure that in any of the various scenarios you don't end up being the person the laments how the other guys "got lucky".

I'm an "other guy" and its insulting when people tell me that I got lucky. Holding through massive crashes and not panic selling, continuing to accumulate during downtrends & buying when fear is all around. Carefully skimming during run ups and not panic dumping way before the correction comes in. Managing principle, hedging risk. (Running a business and family finances whilst doing all of it). Fighting strong emotions, making smart decisions for three years now, is somehow lucky? I'm not a trader, or an investor, or anything. I'm just thinking really hard about how I live my life and the decisions I make and how best I don't shoot myself in the face doing something stupid. I was lucky I found bitcoin early, but since then its been all me.

Well said... Who knows if we will see $300 coins again 

There are no bad signals, just bad interpretations

It's fine to get a signal that results in a bad trade.  No system is perfect. 

What you want is:

1) More signals that result in good trades than bad ones.
2) The bad signals leading to small losses, and the good signals leading to big gains, relatively.

If you satisfy those two criteria, you'll make a lot of money and probably sleep easy at night doing so.

The exact targets in the OP aren't up to date anymore, those were for the first version of the algorithm. In the backtest of the version I've been using for a while now, there was one trade incurring a real loss (-17% BTC), and another one that was pretty much exactly profit neutral, but under the original assumption ("few trades because of larger position"), that would mean a small loss after probable slippage. Plus the recent 'live' loss (-16% USD), for a grand total of -16% in live profits

srsly?

Netscape navigator bugs :')

Nope, I meant lambchop's post. Check his first line, the 'at' symbol he wrote before my username is parsed as a mail link in some browsers I guess.

Wait, I mean: he haxored my Win95 machine and put a virus in my porn folder 

PS. You were replying to NLC, not to me...

I clicked that link and it opened my mail client.

You probably hacked my computer and stole my coinz 

[email protected], I never gave exact entry/exit points, because it can't be done in this market.  Past year+ market has been a totally different market from the one we all knew & loved.  As in qualitatively different.*  I stopped trading.
What I'm trying to say in too many words is you're wasting time with reading bird entrails to read BTC price.
And now you're asking me to do a better entrail reading than you

*Favorite Stalin quote:  "Quantity is a quality too."

I think I provided the exit point here:


Also on the 15th, just before the dumps gained momentum:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=274613.2300

^ You did. But to keep with the original analogy, that's one profitable trade out of 1000s

Seriously though:

I'm ready to admit (and just did so above) that my algorithm is a lot more naively constructed than I realized at first, and needs some serious rewriting, but this was/is supposed to be an exercise in providing a signal that captures mid-term swings of the market -  so the real contest is if you can provide a better signal or not (I don't care if its algorithmic or pulled out of one's ass inner monkey).

And in that sense, Tzupy was doing a lot better than you, as he at least suggested that the 320-450 rally would be fully reversed - even though he didn't provide exact entry/exit points either.

I told you the very thing you yourself eventually concluded.  We talked about insufficient data points, maybe in another thread?  Or am I misremembering?

Absolutely right what you're saying.

But as I said above, it's not the bad trade that bothers me mainly (there was at least one of those in the backtest as well), but that there are simply too few trades in total. I will probably rewrite the conditions for the initial parameter search and rerun it to increase the trade frequency somewhat, not to the point of HFT, but not quite as few as I got now.

thats interesting. my last buy signal came a couple days earlier than yours, but i haven't flipped down yet. i guess it could happen at any moment. i also wouldn't go into this exercise expecting to get 100% correct signals. you could have a very +EV system being right far less than 50% of the time.

Post something else other than brony pics (like entry/exit points for trades, for example), and we'll talk