The viability of Trading Bots.

[mikeywith]

Dont forget to consider that we had unusual hike in all the crypto currencies this year due to outburst of bitcoin's market cap. I think it's very obvious that bitcoin will be affecting your rest of the portfolio in very unique way.

Of course, my strategy barely makes a profit in a bear market since it doesn't short, so it needs a bull market or a coin that has some positive news whereby the coin goes up regardless of the market condition,so if your strategy doesn't lose you money during a bear market then it's good enough IMO.

With that being said, the bot has been online since Aug which the majority of it is bull, if you randomly invested in 10 coins you would be in good profit by now, so it really doesn't indicate anything yet, it needs to run for at least a whole cycle where we see a new ATH followed by a new local bottom, this means 1-2 years at least.

Also, does it mean that bots are not working up that perfectly as compared to manual trading?

It doesn't mean anything yet, I don't have a perfect sample to compare it against, I just laid out that the pros of using a bot are that you don't miss any trade and you stick to your strategy 100%, which I do fail to comply with, for an example, the current ADA position profit is 129.37%, if I was manually trading it, I would close it right now, but the bot is following the code which says don't close it yet, so this 129.37% could end up being 150% or 50% only, whereby in manual trading I would have probably closed it long before, despite that fact that I am not too prone to emotions, I don't think I can go to bed without closing a 129% profit position.

Anyway, when a year has passed and I have long term results from both my manual trading and the bot, I should be able to complete this study, for now, let's just watch the bot do its thing.

BTW, the bot lost a few trades earlier own prior to opening all of these positions, and then I had to reset my orders, ended up at about 500$ back from the 579.11$, so I call that breakeven and I loaded another $500 so the initial cost now is considered $1000.

Current balance including Unrealized PNL = $1,357.0454

[Lakai01]

Thanks for this information! I tried researching and it seems not maintained anymore. By the way, I saw that it has many forks though so I will continue my research from there.

Yes, that's right. Gecko has not been developed for some time.

However, the version uploaded on the page works without any problems. Also, as you said, there are a lot of forks on Github, some of which are linked directly on the Gecko page.

The big "problem" with Gecko for newcomers, however, is that this bot must be hosted itself. I had it running on a Raspberry Pi at the time. Solutions you have to pay for are certainly more comfortable to use, especially for newcomers in the field!

[mikeywith]

The big "problem" with Gecko for newcomers, however, is that this bot must be hosted itself. I had it running on a Raspberry Pi at the time. Solutions you have to pay for are certainly more comfortable to use, especially for newcomers in the field!

You can host it on a free AWS, it's a javascript code that runs on node.js, should be easlity and cheaply hosted anywhere, however, it doesn't seem like it has Binance Futuers ready implemented, I assume that is where most of the trading happens nowadays, with that being said, I think the Binance Futuer API isn't very different from the Spot/default API, so it should be easy implemented, and perhaps one of the forks you talked about it has already done that.

The second option would be to hire someone who knows how to code in python, show them the Binance API
and ask them to write the code for you, I am pretty sure that on Fiverr or the like, you will find people who have already done this and all they need to edit is the strategy itself which does't make much of the code, the majority of the code would be the one that interacts with the exchange to place/close orders, as far as the when to buy/sell goes, for most strategies it's only a matter of a couple of lines.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

You make sense, but even doing the 1-month switch won't really prove anything, with manual trading there will be days when I don't trade or signals that I don't catch, so eventually I will miss many trades,

If you apply same strategy for manual and bot trading the only variable (advantages of algo trading) is:

1- your presence on market
2- your successiveness in sticking to the strategy
3- reaction time

So if you ment to compare bot vs human performance than its good to include p1 factor too (missed trades by not being active 24/7)

and so if those were supposed to be winning trades then my manual results will be bad, if they were more of losing trades then my manual trading results would be better because a losing trade missed is a winning one.

They could be loosing one too.

I didn't know that your bot is going with such long trades. Algo trading show true potential during scalping/MM - basically short term trading. F.e. my trading bot is MM on 7 trading pairs on small exchange, scanning order books each few sec, placing orders all day, filling 200+ trades daily for last 6 months. There is no way for me to be as fast with decisions, as fast with creating orders 24/7. Human would catch like 5% of this trades and
die of boredom after a week. Here true power of algo trading shows up. During trades that takes months bot is not that useful and its hard to evaluate its performance especially during bull run that we have now. You will need months if not years to draw valuable conclusions.

[jaberwock]

and so if those were supposed to be winning trades then my manual results will be bad, if they were more of losing trades then my manual trading results would be better because a losing trade missed is a winning one.

They could be loosing one too.

I didn't know that your bot is going with such long trades. Algo trading show true potential during scalping/MM - basically short term trading. F.e. my trading bot is MM on 7 trading pairs on small exchange, scanning order books each few sec, placing orders all day, filling 200+ trades daily for last 6 months. There is no way for me to be as fast with decisions, as fast with creating orders 24/7. Human would catch like 5% of this trades and
die of boredom after a week. Here true power of algo trading shows up. During trades that takes months bot is not that useful and its hard to evaluate its performance especially during bull run that we have now. You will need months if not years to draw valuable conclusions.

I am not entirely sure if we are talking about the same thing here, but I want to say basically something similar about this as well. Not only I would say manual vs bot would be the same thing except bot would be basically you but 7/24 non-stop with no emotions, basically a robot version of you, but I would like to also say no bot is magical, you make the bot what it is.

What trading bots are selling to you is the right to make yourself into a trading robot, that's it, no trading bot seller can guarantee you income, no trading bot seller could tell you "just put this in, put some money in, click start and collect cash" because nothing like that ever existed and will never exist neither, every single bot project owner can come to me and try to proof otherwise and I will guarantee you they will fail. What they are selling to you is just you as a robot, so if you are a bad trader, even if bot works 7/24 that will not make a profit no matter what.

[mikeywith]

I didn't know that your bot is going with such long trades.

It trades on the 1H chart for the most part, but the take profit points are very extended, and it uses a trailing stop so some trades do extend to well over 100%, but since my main focus is not to lose money so the initial SL kind of tight, so the bot can make 10 losing trades of small loses and then makes 1-2 large winning trades.

Algo trading show true potential during scalping/MM - basically short term trading.

I could never develop something that works on 1M or 5M time frames, even when the backtesting shows great results, the real testing shows other wise, given the nature of the crypto market I just don't think I can do with these small timeframes, but this doesn't mean I don't need the bot when trying to trade 10 pairs on the 1H chart, it still requires hours of monitoring and the worst thing is the entry and exit, it's very hard to be available once you need to exit.



If you look at the last couple of close positions, in my manual trading I only entered one EOS/USDT trade which resulted in a loss, the bot managed to get all of these trades on these two pairs, and despite losing 8 out of 12 trades, it still made 60.48% profit against 8.02% loss.

But I wouldn't get excited yet, this is a bull market era, most random strategies will work and outperform manual trading as long as they only open longs, the real challenge is the side-ways and bear markets.