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?

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

Awesome work.

I am currently doing some research on how to get historical data from different exchanges to enable backtesting features. I want to use your tool to download everything into a SQLite db so that my bot can read this data. However I am running into trouble installing your tool:

• I have installed python 2.7 (requirement of Google API client library)
• I have downloaded the Google API client library and updated the clients_secrets and its in folder A
• I have downloaded bq and pykrete in folder B and C

Do I need to point bq to pykrete and the Google library or do I need to put certain files at certain places? Maybe there is an installation doc I missed?

I have registered, always nice to see more and more alternatives. Site looks clean & the UX is pretty good for such a techical tool, nice job.

You are talking about the limits of a free account, does this mean you will offer a paid service as well? If not is it open source?

There was one big thing on the website though: you are logging the password in plain text to console. I was checking it out with someone behind me who now caught a glimpse of my password. This probably also means the password is now stored in plain text in my browser's cache somewhere. You really need to fix this ASAP imo.

I think I get the picture, thanks for the explanation. So if the bot detects a trend the advantage of this method vs EMA is that if the trend is not real the bot does not have gambled the full balance on it. Is that the advantage? Because when you know there is going to be an uptrend you want to buy asap, right?

When I'm done with the backtesting feature of Gekko it will also be a lot easier to test these methods on historical data.

There is a tiny practical problem if you want to implement this method into Gekko right now. Because it only knows EMA at the moment and thus only has to sell or buy everything at once I would need to adjust the way Gekko handles the advice from the method to the real orders. If I understand it correctly your method would advice at a given moment something like 'sell 10% of balance' (and fire these advices of multiple times during the trend). Is that true? In that case I will update Gekko so that your trading method can be implemented.

I am slowly getting to a point where I think Gekko runs pretty stable. Here are a couple of features I've added in the last few days:

Gekko now uses a portfolio manager to calculate the orders more precise (auto trading at BTC-e and Bitstamp is much better)

In my testing it is pretty stable at selling and buying at all three exchanges (It did cost me some fee haha). It wil create an order if the balance is bigger than the minimal order size (different per exchange), check if the order gets filled, if not do it again, etc.

You can now pass a command line parameter to tell Gekko which config file to use

I use this so that I can easily watch and trade at all three exchanges at the same time using the same Gekko code (I copied the config multiple times). I also have multiple non-trading Gekkos running at different currencies at Mt. Gox (and Gekkos with different EMA settings at BTC/USD) to calculate the most profitable settings / currency exchange over time (backtesting is on the todo).


I used nohup to route Gekkos output to different log files. For more information about how to specify other config files or how to use nohup (or an alternative) check out the 'advanced features' documentation.

That's awsome! I don't quite understand the reasoning behind the math yet though.

I've written gekko so that it should be pretty modular: In theory you only have to create a new file and place it into method and enable it in the config. The easiest is to hack the current EMA method, but basically gekko currently expects this from a trading method:

• Needs to be a file inside the method folder
• It needs to expose an evenEmitter (see current method) so that Gekko can talk to it.
• It needs to listen to `init` and the watcher object that follows.
• It can use the `getTrades` method on the watcher to get data to analyze
• It should not advice before the `start` event (from Gekko).
• Gekko expects the method to emit the event advice whenever it advices a BUY, SELL or HOLD (with meta data)

I will write better documentation describing how to add new trading methods, similar to the documentation on how to add exchanges. If you need help just let me know, and in the meantime I am curious about the trading method. Could you maybe point me to some reading explaining the logic of the method?

EDIT:

if your method is similar to EMA in that it will fetch trades each candle / interval, calculate a bunch of numbers based on the latest price and advice based on those numbers it is the easiest to use the whole EMA method (but you can ofcourse rewrite it if you want).

I do agree that you shouldn't always trust everything, especially things with a download button. However:

If you are a programmer why you don't you just read the code yourself instead of not trusting the maintainer? As a programmer you are always building on top of / using stuff others created, it is just not feasible to reinvent the wheel every time imo. I think open source software like this needs more verification from people able to read the code.

I don't quite understand your position: have you read the source of bitcoin-qt? Do you even use proprietary software? I know there is a difference between software of an established company and a github repo. The bot is up for over a year, the code has beed tested and read.

I don't see any real world way for the maintainers to exploit an unoptimized version of the bot: If a 1000 people were using this bot with all 1BTC on their account this would in no way be able to move a market with a size of Mt. Gox to anything which can be easily exploited. Even if there was something like a hidden button the maintainer could press to make all the bots sell or buy (which there wasn't last time I checked).

It is always important to check free tools like these that are being offered but writing things from scratch is no option except when you are a programmer yourself AND have the time to take on a new project.

The query language for BigQuery is pretty similar to SQL. You can just ask bigQuery to return the date data in the format you want:

For everyone who needs timestamp instead of a date string:


This will return:


For everyone who needs the date and the time data in separated columns:


This will return:


Edit, here is a list of stuff you can do related to date/time.

That's the reason why I build Gekko. I personally use it on my VPS which is on 24/7 anyway (for a couple of bucks a month). But you can also run it on a raspberry or similar. Gekko doen't have the overhead of the whole browser Chrome (doesn't even need gui, runs fine on my ubuntu-server), etc. Also it's extremely easy to daemonize / keep running for days.

IRC is een chat protocol. Het makkelijkst is om naar een webchat te gaan.

If your (older) version of Gekko is running smooth you can ignore this.

There are currently two bugs in dependencies of Gekko. I've submitted a fix for both but until these get merged you have to quickfix them yourself.

These bugs only effect your Gekko when you are watching either Mt. Gox or BTC-e.

You can read more in the readme.

Your node version is out of date, the Bitstamp module doesn't really require node 0.10 but other dependencies do. Could you try to update to 0.10.x?

Awesome that you got it working!

For everyone one else facing problems: there is a new bug in the MtGox dependency yet again. Once my patch is accepted I will let Gekko use that version until I have checked all next updates myself. To get the latest version of Gekko running on Mt. Gox I think you have to apply this fix (in `node_modules/mtgox-apiv2/mtgox.js`) until it has been fixed upstream.

Thanks, that's what I am hoping to achieve with Gekko. Also to raise the bar for existing trade bots. (though it is not quite at a decent level itself right now imo)

Github user lockdoc has added a bunch of information to Gekko that explains how you can run Gekko silently forever:

Running Gekko headless

This is really sweet, thanks!

It is now possible to set a currency for Mt. Gox, for advice as well as real trading (as well as a lot of minor bug fixes)!

Do note that there currently is a bug in a dependency (caused by none other then myself) that will mess up all trades at Mt. Gox. Refer to this issue for the whole story and how to fix it!

Edit: I have also written some documentation explaining how to configure real trading in more detail. This will hopefully demystify a lot around how Gekko handles real trading.

https://github.com/askmike/gekko/blob/master/docs/Configuring_gekko.md

It is true that EMA crossover is even simpler then MACD, but the bot currently does add a threshold which is also not in Goomboo's journal (I think). I'm don't know a lot about trading but I think MACD is considered an extremely simple indicator already.

I am currently stabilising Gekko so that it can correctly handle all current exchanges (with decent error handling, and making sure all orders are filled). When this is done it will be easy to add more exchanges to Gekko relatively easy. I will put this exchange on my list and will research it when this moment is there.

I have a proposal for everyone working on (a fork of) the chrome browser extension. In an effort to improve the quality of our bots / projects and to speed up development I am creating a new way (sort of mini standard) at how our different projects could handle different exchanges efficiently:

(Born out of the requests by a lot of users to enable different exchanges, I figured this is about the right time since AFAIK out of all JS projects only Gekko supports exchanges besides Mt. Gox right now)

Gekko is going to use a 'portfolio manager' to handle all advices from the bot (like "buy now" or "sell now") and route them to the exchange the user prefers. I am proposing a way at which different exchanges could be implemented the same way by using this 'portfolio manager'. I am talking about the `portfolio managers expectations` and the `trading method expectations` as described in docs/Exchanges.md. I think standards like this would really speed up the development of different projects. If anybody has any ideas of things that need to be different / added to the document please let me know (or submit a pull request if you are a developer).

Note that the document is in early draft.

This would mean some rewriting of how the current chrome bot works BUT if you implement this system you will basically get all differences between all exchanges that I add to Gekko with minimal effort* (you would only need to write your own API wrapper because of the difference between Node and Chrome) but all the differences how each API returns stuff are abstracted out by me. Once Gekko's portfolio manager is there you could also port all that code into the chrome bot.

*Once the portfolio manager is added to Gekko this will be Mt. Gox, BTC-e and Bitstamp right away (the three biggest exchanges at this moment).