(Closed) Butter Bot!: Premier Bitstamp, and BTC-E EMA Trading Platform (Closed)

[fible1]

@ Pablo

By the way, does the back testing take into account the idea that the computer the bot runs on would need to be reset periodically?

Does shutting down and turning on B-Bot every week over the course of that year affect the results? (You said a number of days ago that the bot remembers certain critical things at power on)

Hey ,
   The back testing assumes that the bot has run both without interruption and without intervention. I think (and this is just me thinking out loud, no plans on this yet) that it would make sense to have the bot eventually run on our servers and have people mod settings and use tools from the extension.

Ah, you stole my idea! Hehe, anyway, considering how the bot works it sounds like it needs a 24x7 environment.

Any idea how badly restarts will affect B-Bot? Is there a way to measure the damage from such an interruption?

(The reason I ask is because B-Bot is a plugin inside a browser....so 24x7 uptime even in chrome is hard to achieve. I restart my chrome once a month on average.)

Just to repeat, drops in connection are not good because the bot misses opportunities, intervention in trading is critically bad to how the bot will perform over the long term; it basically annuls the back testing.



Let me know if you need anything .

Pablo.

Is there a way to determine just how bad the result is with "reasonable" levels of interruption?

Vs

A server environment (that short of a tornado or an Admin hanging by the cables...really wouldn't interrupt the process.

Hi PuertoLibre ,
  Restarts affect the bot in the sense that they represent downtime. The bot will get all it's data points from the server every time you turn it on, so that's not an issue.

There is no easy way to determine the impact of downtime, I can tell you that it puts a serious dent in bot profitability. I understand we can't all run servers, but we should aim for as much uptime as possible. The more downtime the more backtesting goes out the window. Just FYI, I've been running the bot nonstop on my macbook air since we launched the software so it is doable (I use a free app to stop the laptop from going to sleep, that's all you need). And just to repeat myself, if downtime is bad, intervention explodes a hydrogen bomb on back testing.

Please let me know if I can be of any further service .

Pablo.

[Kuroth]

I tend to be a paranoid person..   

I think a lot of it was brought on from back in my foolish days when I use to play a lot of on-line poker..   I swear there are 1,000's ways those poker sites could cheat their customers if they wanted to and I believe to this day(Although I never had proof) that some of them did cheat..


So I guess when I look at Mt Gox and I noticed very strange buy bids that seem to get placed right around the top of the hour that look like this

0.1   0.1126   103.89040


Who in the world would place a Buy bid to buy just 0.1126 of  BTC?  Makes no sense..   Makes my wild mind wonder if someone working for Mt Gox is placing these at the top of the hour to try and trigger Trade bots to buy or sell thus generating a Trade Fee...   

Ok I know I am paranoid..  Just makes you wonder sometimes how we could be played.. 

[fible1]

I tend to be a paranoid person..   

I think a lot of it was brought on from back in my foolish days when I use to play a lot of on-line poker..   I swear there are 1,000's ways those poker sites could cheat their customers if they wanted to and I believe to this day(Although I never had proof) that some of them did cheat..


So I guess when I look at Mt Gox and I noticed very strange buy bids that seem to get placed right around the top of the hour that look like this

0.1   0.1126   103.89040


Who in the world would place a Buy bid to buy just 0.1126 of  BTC?  Makes no sense..   Makes my wild mind wonder if someone working for Mt Gox is placing these at the top of the hour to try and trigger Trade bots to buy or sell thus generating a Trade Fee...   

Ok I know I am paranoid..  Just makes you wonder sometimes how we could be played.. 

Related to this point: It is well known that there are a group of very wealthy early Bitcoin adopters who play with Mt. Gox by moving their large reserves. It's actually something a lot of people try; I heard from a marketer not too long ago who was launching a bogus site and he claimed he would be moving the Bitcoin market somewhere between the 12-16th August (don't remember the exact date). Mt. Gox doesn't need to do it, enough people with a lot of time on their hands are trying it already. The good news is that the market is maturing and less gullible than it used to be so these dumps and schemes are generating increasingly lower swings.

Pablo.

[Pangia]

I tend to be a paranoid person..    

I think a lot of it was brought on from back in my foolish days when I use to play a lot of on-line poker..   I swear there are 1,000's ways those poker sites could cheat their customers if they wanted to and I believe to this day(Although I never had proof) that some of them did cheat..


So I guess when I look at Mt Gox and I noticed very strange buy bids that seem to get placed right around the top of the hour that look like this

0.1   0.1126   103.89040


Who in the world would place a Buy bid to buy just 0.1126 of  BTC?  Makes no sense..   Makes my wild mind wonder if someone working for Mt Gox is placing these at the top of the hour to try and trigger Trade bots to buy or sell thus generating a Trade Fee...  

Ok I know I am paranoid..  Just makes you wonder sometimes how we could be played..  

Hi Kuroth,

You're not the only one thinking this.  I've also been watching the trades on the hour and came to a similar opinion that perhaps there was manipulation to trigger the bots. It doesn't have to only be about trade fees, it could be someone wanting to unload at a price and manipulates the BTC price up by a few cents to get their coins sold.  But I dismissed my theory as just paranoia as well.

Perhaps in the future versions of the Bot, we can set our own times. For example, instead of 1 hour time-frames, we can do 1 hour and 1 minute, or 23 hours instead of 24 hours.  This way, there won't be 50,000 people with Bots that can be triggered on set specific times.  The ability to customize time-frames would provide greater diversity and make it difficult for manipulators to time things. Or maybe I'm just too paranoid and suspicious of everything.

[fible1]

I tend to be a paranoid person..    

I think a lot of it was brought on from back in my foolish days when I use to play a lot of on-line poker..   I swear there are 1,000's ways those poker sites could cheat their customers if they wanted to and I believe to this day(Although I never had proof) that some of them did cheat..


So I guess when I look at Mt Gox and I noticed very strange buy bids that seem to get placed right around the top of the hour that look like this

0.1   0.1126   103.89040


Who in the world would place a Buy bid to buy just 0.1126 of  BTC?  Makes no sense..   Makes my wild mind wonder if someone working for Mt Gox is placing these at the top of the hour to try and trigger Trade bots to buy or sell thus generating a Trade Fee...  

Ok I know I am paranoid..  Just makes you wonder sometimes how we could be played..  

Hi Kuroth,

You're not the only one thinking this.  I've also been watching the trades on the hour and came to a similar opinion that perhaps there was manipulation to trigger the bots. It doesn't have to only be about trade fees, it could be someone wanting to unload at a price and manipulates the BTC price up by a few cents to get their coins sold.  But I dismissed my theory as just paranoia as well.

Perhaps in the future versions of the Bot, we can set our own times. For example, instead of 1 hour time-frames, we can do 1 hour and 1 minute, or 23 hours instead of 24 hours.  This way, there won't be 50,000 people with Bots that can be triggered on set specific times.  The ability to customize time-frames would provide greater diversity and make it difficult for manipulators to time things. Or maybe I'm just too paranoid and suspicious of everything.

I agree very much with this feature request, we have a lot on our plate right now but I will discuss this with the dev team. This way we can all settle our thoughts on this, I think it's better to be safe than sorry. Don't expect it too soon though, we are prioritizing new features right now, especially back testing.

Pablo.

[Pangia]

Thanks Pablo. 

[fible1]

Thanks Pablo. 

.

[Kuroth]

I tend to be a paranoid person..    

I think a lot of it was brought on from back in my foolish days when I use to play a lot of on-line poker..   I swear there are 1,000's ways those poker sites could cheat their customers if they wanted to and I believe to this day(Although I never had proof) that some of them did cheat..


So I guess when I look at Mt Gox and I noticed very strange buy bids that seem to get placed right around the top of the hour that look like this

0.1   0.1126   103.89040


Who in the world would place a Buy bid to buy just 0.1126 of  BTC?  Makes no sense..   Makes my wild mind wonder if someone working for Mt Gox is placing these at the top of the hour to try and trigger Trade bots to buy or sell thus generating a Trade Fee...  

Ok I know I am paranoid..  Just makes you wonder sometimes how we could be played..  

Hi Kuroth,

You're not the only one thinking this.  I've also been watching the trades on the hour and came to a similar opinion that perhaps there was manipulation to trigger the bots. It doesn't have to only be about trade fees, it could be someone wanting to unload at a price and manipulates the BTC price up by a few cents to get their coins sold.  But I dismissed my theory as just paranoia as well.

Perhaps in the future versions of the Bot, we can set our own times. For example, instead of 1 hour time-frames, we can do 1 hour and 1 minute, or 23 hours instead of 24 hours.  This way, there won't be 50,000 people with Bots that can be triggered on set specific times.  The ability to customize time-frames would provide greater diversity and make it difficult for manipulators to time things. Or maybe I'm just too paranoid and suspicious of everything.

You Read my mind..  +1 to this idea..

[fible1]

Hey Guys ,
   I think we will be ready to make feature announcements for V2.1 and I think you guys will be happily surprised with what we have come up with .

In the meantime, because I've gotten a bunch of PM's about this, here is the full trade history for 1 year back testing:

http://pastebin.com/iKv4M4wW

Notice how the first couple of months are erratic until the math has had time to settle.

Whatever anyone needs, please just let me know .

Pablo.

[Kuroth]

Interesting and shows the patience that EMA takes..   I just hope we have some good swings coming up as EMA will make very little to negative without some good swings..

[Pangia]

Hey Guys ,
   I think we will be ready to make feature announcements for V2.1 and I think you guys will be happily surprised with what we have come up with .

In the meantime, because I've gotten a bunch of PM's about this, here is the full trade history for 1 year back testing:

http://pastebin.com/iKv4M4wW

Notice how the first couple of months are erratic until the math has had time to settle.

Whatever anyone needs, please just let me know .

Pablo.

Hi Pablo,

I gave the pastebin a look. The returns were impressive.  I have one question regarding the trades.  

49 -- 13.04.2013 18:00:00     sell    100.657   363.07%
50 -- 12.04.2013 22:00:00     buy    111.000   413.48%
51 -- 10.04.2013 15:00:00     sell    150.000   416.32%
52 -- 30.03.2013 00:00:00     buy    92.700    220.85%

In line 52 we see that there is a buy on March 30, 2013 at $92.70 and then a sell of those coins on April 01, 2013.at $150.00 (line 51).
Then the next transaction (line 50) isn't until April 12, 2013.

My question is this: what happened between April 02, 2013 and April 11, 2013.  

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg5zczsg2013-04-03zeg2013-04-12ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zl

We know that Bitcoin went from approx $140 to $266 around the aforementioned time-frame and then collapsed, yet the back-test shows that the bot would not have made a transaction during this volatile period.

Why would that have been?  

[fible1]

Hey Guys ,
   I think we will be ready to make feature announcements for V2.1 and I think you guys will be happily surprised with what we have come up with .

In the meantime, because I've gotten a bunch of PM's about this, here is the full trade history for 1 year back testing:

http://pastebin.com/iKv4M4wW

Notice how the first couple of months are erratic until the math has had time to settle.

Whatever anyone needs, please just let me know .

Pablo.

Hi Pablo,

I gave the pastebin a look. The returns were impressive.  I have one question regarding the trades. 

49 -- 13.04.2013 18:00:00     sell    100.657   363.07%
50 -- 12.04.2013 22:00:00     buy    111.000   413.48%
51 -- 10.04.2013 15:00:00     sell    150.000   416.32%
52 -- 30.03.2013 00:00:00     buy    92.700    220.85%

In line 52 we see that there is a buy on March 30, 2013 at $92.70 and then a sell of those coins on April 01, 2013.at $150.00 (line 51).
Then the next transaction (line 50) isn't until April 12, 2013.

My question is this: what happened between April 02, 2013 and April 11, 2013.  We know that Bitcoin went from approx $140 to $266 around the aforementioned time-frame and then collapsed, yet the back-test shows that the bot would not have made a transaction during this volatile period.

Why would that have been? 

Hi Pangia ,
   The bot does not necessarily trade when there is volatility, rather it trades on the up and down swings volatility creates. Having given only a cursory look at the numbers for those dates it looks to me that although there were ups and downs the bot was generally holding a "Sell" command between the 10th and 12th which makes sense since the BTC price took a big hit.

This is normal behavior, unlike a high frequency bot or other strategy, EMA seeks to identify trends and stick to them, in this case the trend was down, hence "sell", regardless of there having been small ups and downs in between.

Please let me know if you have any other questions .

Pablo.

[Pangia]

Thanks for the clarification Pablo.

[fible1]

Thanks for the clarification Pablo.

If you need anything else, please just let me know .

For V3 we hope to provide alternate strategy modules so that you can run, say, a high frequency bot instead of an EMA bot and take advantage of micro fluctuations instead of trends. We're working hard on making Butter-Bot as versatile as possible .

Pablo.

[Kuroth]

Thanks for the clarification Pablo.

If you need anything else, please just let me know .

For V3 we hope to provide alternate strategy modules so that you can run, say, a high frequency bot instead of an EMA bot and take advantage of micro fluctuations instead of trends. We're working hard on making Butter-Bot as versatile as possible .

Pablo.
[/quote



This sounds interesting..  What is a high frequency bot?  And can you really make decent profits using high frequency bot even with the Trade Fees?   I have never actually put pen to paper to figure out exactly what you need to make per trade to make a profit with the Trade fee included...

I know in Goomboo's thread he showed how Trade fess affect you greatly..

Anyone have numbers or stats that show this?

[fible1]

Thanks for the clarification Pablo.

If you need anything else, please just let me know .

For V3 we hope to provide alternate strategy modules so that you can run, say, a high frequency bot instead of an EMA bot and take advantage of micro fluctuations instead of trends. We're working hard on making Butter-Bot as versatile as possible .

Pablo.
[/quote



This sounds interesting..  What is a high frequency bot?  And can you really make decent profits using high frequency bot even with the Trade Fees?   I have never actually put pen to paper to figure out exactly what you need to make per trade to make a profit with the Trade fee included...

I know in Goomboo's thread he showed how Trade fess affect you greatly..

Anyone have numbers or stats that show this?

A high frequency bot has a much lower trade interval, minutes maybe, hoping to take advantage of micro movements instead of trends. I mentioned a high frequency bot because it has been requested many, many, times. We are still working on developing this and we will of course have back testing data to support the efficiency of our new modules.

If anyone has suggestions on modules they would like to see, or how we can improve our ideas, please drop us a line, we look froward to feedback .

Pablo.

[Kuroth]

I sure wish BTC would drop to 60.00 right now..   

If you follow Genesis Block, there was a good articial on how BTC has been pretty stagnant as of late..

 

[Kuroth]

Pretty Stiff Fees if you ask me..   

Call me paranoid but Pablo do you think you can add that option for us to vary our EMA check times???  I am trying to think in my head how this could be implemented..

Maybe just like a check box option like

EMA check time..     10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60

So for example If I pick 10 that would mean my Bot would do the 1 Hr checks at 10 after..    12:10, 1:10. 2:10 etc..

I like that..



2013/08/08 13:02:03   Fee      $0.04239   $868.90525
BTC sold: [tid:1375966923436835] 0.06926616 BTC at $102.00000 (0.6% fee)
2013/08/08 13:02:03   Earned      $7.06515   $868.94764
BTC sold: [tid:1375966923436835] 0.06926616 BTC at $102.00000
2013/08/08 13:02:03   Fee      $5.20251   $861.88249
BTC sold: [tid:1375966923395778] 8.50000000 BTC at $102.01000 (0.6% fee)

[fible1]

Pretty Stiff Fees if you ask me..   

Call me paranoid but Pablo do you think you can add that option for us to vary our EMA check times???  I am trying to think in my head how this could be implemented..

Maybe just like a check box option like

EMA check time..     10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60

So for example If I pick 10 that would mean my Bot would do the 1 Hr checks at 10 after..    12:10, 1:10. 2:10 etc..

I like that..



2013/08/08 13:02:03   Fee      $0.04239   $868.90525
BTC sold: [tid:1375966923436835] 0.06926616 BTC at $102.00000 (0.6% fee)
2013/08/08 13:02:03   Earned      $7.06515   $868.94764
BTC sold: [tid:1375966923436835] 0.06926616 BTC at $102.00000
2013/08/08 13:02:03   Fee      $5.20251   $861.88249
BTC sold: [tid:1375966923395778] 8.50000000 BTC at $102.01000 (0.6% fee)

Hi Kuroth,
   Yes, this will be a part of V2.1. You will be able to specify how many minutes before or after the hour you want your bot to sample the market at and trade .

Please let me know if you need anything else.

Pablo.

[fible1]

****************
Demo Version
****************

I just want to let everyone know that we have enabled a demo version of the bot to which you can refer your friends if they are interested in the bot but not yet committed to purchasing . You can find the demo bot on the main page: www.butter-bot.com; the demo lets you test drive the full featured bot for a full hour so you can get a hang of the features and running ops.

Please let me know if anyone needs anything .

Pablo.