Hi Askit2,
Have a chat with Ianwhitbread. Sorry, I am a bit too lazy at the moment to search back through the thread, but it seems he had hit upon a winning formula and was happy enough with the small but consistent profit ATP was generating (barring MtGox cock ups that is).
Maybe if you ask him nicely he will tell you his secret.
Mental note to self....ask Ianwhitbread for his config settings The logic isn't the problem well at least my trading logic isn't. When MTGoX ticker was reliable for me this logic made me ~3% per day easily. By reliable I mean with a polling interval of 30 and a max tick age of 60 I had a USD with 90+ ticks. I was missing 1/4th of the ticks or less.
Currently with a 30 second polling interval and a max tick age of 120 I get less then 110. The perfect number would be 240. So I have 110 data points and am missing 130 data points. How accurate can I expect any trade logic to be missing half its data? I would say maybe 50%.
Currently on MTGoX I get reliable ticker data sporadically and I miss blocks of time of at least 2 minutes and usually 5 minutes regularly. How accurate could the trade be on the tick after a 5 minute sabbatical? I would bet not very. Add to that fun fact that the ticker frequently goes AWOL when the market heads a direction quickly and I get a lot of missed trades.
Even if the logic is great it is very hard to fight the nothing storm from MTGoX. I can sit on MTGoX website and when ATP loses its ticker at a weight of .009BTC of .01 BTC minimum (MTGoX tells me that is the minimum). I can watch the market go in the required direction for the trade to execute at a rate fast enough the ticker isn't bumped around much. The trade is missed by the nothingness. When the next tick comes in half the time the market is up slightly and it buys if the market had been heading down.
I'm not saying ATP is bad. But with a large near term gap in data maybe a trade isn't the best thing on the next tick. Possibly I am the only one having this much trouble with MTGoX ticker. I doubt it. Maybe the 50X errors crashing ATP only happen to me. I doubt it. Maybe the missing ticker data only happens to people who haven't paid MTGoX enough in fees. I don't know. Some one is trading when I can't get data. I can literally watch it happen.
Right now I have a max tick age of 120 and a polling interval of 15. I should have 480 data points. I have 130. I am averaging 25% successful polls. If I actually got 1 per minute reliably I would be OK with it. I get bursts of 2 minutes of polling then nothing for more. When I am lucky I get 2 in 60 seconds. It doesn't matter what I set the polling interval to I average a low %. I really doubt that any trading logic deals well with intermittent data. If you can point out one that that actually times out so it would stop trading when I am missing too much data I would very likely add it.
I appreciate both Aido and Nova's work I asked about the ticker because I am quite sure it would fix my problem or at least lessen the problem.
Some other fun facts.
I started with 0.41 BTC.
Today I had more then 15 BTC trading volume for the month.
Today I had 0.36 left. I have lost maybe 6$.
The logic is solid. It buys USD when I would want and sells USD when I want.