Image of my Trading Bot (and it's low power!)

[itake]

Do you use the bitcoincharts.com API? It says I shouldn't rely on it, so I collect and cache prices myself.

Yeah, I saw that it said that too.  I think they don't want people accidently DDOSing their servers.  I just collect the most recent (3 days back) data from bitcoin charts.  It is just easier and I haven't had any problems with it.

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[MatthewLM]

How is it performing now, since the bitcoin price has become rather flat?

I'm sure my bot will pick better trades if prices become more volatile again. It's easy to make false signals when it is flat.

[angelo95]

How is it performing now, since the bitcoin price has become rather flat?

I'm sure my bot will pick better trades if prices become more volatile again. It's easy to make false signals when it is flat.

The thing is I am not sure it will become again as volatile as before again. I am from now 'training' my bot to perform on a flatter market...

[MatthewLM]

My bot is supposed to figure out everything in roughly 30 seconds with 4 days of price data. I don't have to train it over time. I hoped it would adapt to the flatter prices and stop making poor signals but I have run the algorithm very long, so I will see what happens over a bit more time...

[angelo95]

By training I mean refining your algos. I make them better all the time, and improve the speed to. My bot is now multi-threaded and reacts in 3 seconds, with a giant database to store the history.

[itake]

By training I mean refining your algos. I make them better all the time, and improve the speed to. My bot is now multi-threaded and reacts in 3 seconds, with a giant database to store the history.

Speaking of bitcoin charts not beign reliable... the site went down for a little bit today lol.

What language did you write your bot in?

---------------------

The performance data listed previously was over this range:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg30zczsg2011-06-18zeg2011-07-11zvztgSzm1g10zm2g25

[angelo95]

By training I mean refining your algos. I make them better all the time, and improve the speed to. My bot is now multi-threaded and reacts in 3 seconds, with a giant database to store the history.

Speaking of bitcoin charts not beign reliable... the site went down for a little bit today lol.

What language did you write your bot in?

---------------------

The performance data listed previously was over this range:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg30zczsg2011-06-18zeg2011-07-11zvztgSzm1g10zm2g25

What site? I am using Mtgox data. I started the bot in php and I am now slighty converting it to python. Php is not the fastest language but for a network application it's ok.

[itake]

By training I mean refining your algos. I make them better all the time, and improve the speed to. My bot is now multi-threaded and reacts in 3 seconds, with a giant database to store the history.

Speaking of bitcoin charts not beign reliable... the site went down for a little bit today lol.

What language did you write your bot in?

---------------------

The performance data listed previously was over this range:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg30zczsg2011-06-18zeg2011-07-11zvztgSzm1g10zm2g25

What site? I am using Mtgox data. I started the bot in php and I am now slighty converting it to python. Php is not the fastest language but for a network application it's ok.

Bitcoin charts was down for about 10 mins.  my algo isn't very resource intensive, so I haven't really had any probs with efficiency.  I am debating on whether or not to add a slicker interface to help me analyze the data better.

I don't like how there isn't a good way to determine what the actual cost per coin was for a completed (or incomplete) order.  So I am just guessing that every order was filled at the expected price.

[angelo95]

If you trade on mtgox, why don't you use mtgox data?

[itake]

If you trade on mtgox, why don't you use mtgox data?

MtGox only gives you recent trades (I think?).  They don't have the nice start/end time params that bitcoin charts has.  For my bot, I need to look some distance in the past.

[MatthewLM]

I could increase the performance by taking advantage of GPU parrellel computing. The performance increase could be massive. I will look into it.

[angelo95]

I could increase the performance by taking advantage of GPU parrellel computing. The performance increase could be massive. I will look into it.

I don't think so. You are still limited by your connection to mtgox via internet. Could you elaborate on this?

[MatthewLM]

Downloading the data takes about 2 seconds maximum and the rest takes almost 30 seconds to compute. My algorithm runs on a single thread when I could separate tasks out to 50 cores including the 48 cores the GeForce 320M apparently has.

[angelo95]

30 secs of computing seems a lot to me for a simple bot. Are you running a db (like SQL) or something? Mine takes almost nothing to compute the algo with a few hundreds mysql queries per minute. I run it on a core 2 duo CPU.

But maybe you are running a Monte-carlo simulation on it... I don't want to go in the secret of your algorithm 

[MatthewLM]

Database? No idea why that is needed.

All I can say is my algorithm is supposed to do lots of computations to create the best results but my tests are making me disappointed so far. It's by no means supposed to be a simple algorithm set to follow one simple strategy.

It's in early stages though.

[angelo95]

The OP has been successful with a simple script. I think at this stage it's the way to go. There is not enough volatility, nor volume to make it more complicated. This is what I get looking at many successful bot related stories...

[MatthewLM]

Can his bot adapt automatically? What if he runs it for a long time but the strategy used is no longer appropriate to changing bitcoin circumstances?

[angelo95]

We don't know what kind of algos he used in it. And as you might know, it's not polite to ask about algos 

However you can implement many scenarios to manage pretty much any situation and still get a decent execution time. The bitcoin activity has nothing to compare with the density of the Forex.

I have also optimized my code to go from 3 minutes to a few seconds.

[itake]

Can his bot adapt automatically? What if he runs it for a long time but the strategy used is no longer appropriate to changing bitcoin circumstances?

My bot is very very simple and there is nothing dynamic about it.  Ignoring all of the code for talking with the server, my bot is about 80 lines of code.

I think that there isn't enough market data for a bot to be really complicated.  We are really only working with about 3 months of data.

The market is also extremely small, making it very volatile and random.  A few days ago, someone sold like $23k worth of BTC and it caused the market to drop about $3.  This randomness and lack of data makes calculating trends difficult.  I gave up trying to figure out the little swings and I mostly just look at whats in the ticker feed.

Plus, the small hourly swings are very hard to take advantage of because there isn't that much market volume.  So with small swings, there might not be enough coins to purchase at that price.

I have absolutely no expertise in trading, so I really don't know what I am doing.

[angelo95]

I totally agree with you.