Hello,
I'm a newbie still on the fence about purchasing CAT. Here's my top 10 list of questions or concerns. Please forgive any silly or obvious errors. Yes, I did read the FAQ, but not every post in these threads.
1. How do you conduct the transaction to purchase CAT? are you using a third party escrow?
No escrow used - I believed other people here asking questions after they run the application, so if they were not scammed, I expected the same for me.
5. What's the average amount someone needs to use CAT, including the purchase price? 1 BTC plus 2 or 3 BTC to trade? is that low or high? does it scale to even larger amounts?
I advise people to invest 1.5 BTC - one for a license and 0.5 as the beginning portfolio. Using more BTC is risky by my opinion - the gain is not linearly proportional, I think in bigger amounts it goes logarithmic and the risk of big price movement is higher. Big orders are not as frequent as smaller ones.
6. Any performance measurements on CAT? does it run better on windows or mac or linux?
It is written in Java, so ask for performance measurements for a regular window app that communicates continuously over the internet
7. I want to run this on a PC and just leave it alone. But can I? How often do I need to maintain the program? Cancel all trades and restart it daily?
I restart markets daily, there are opinions between 1-3 days, most of gain is collected in first 12-24 hours.
8. What I've read of the Ping/Pong strategy is that its only useful in a sideways market. is that true? Won't it sell short on big upward trends and hold too long on doward trends?
Provided that you invest in a lot of markets and use smaller amounts (my strategy is 0.01 buy and 0.01 sell, 20 markets), the risk of devaluation by mass price decrease is reduced, but not elliminated of course. 2 weeks ago I had a loss day and sometimes my portfolio rises only by half of total gain reported by CAT, sometimes a bit higher, the main point is that, in long term, you are collecting small gains and the value grows. I will try to increase volumes only if two conditions are met: cryptsy to be fast and accurate enough, and the markets not to be collectively overbought/oversold.
9. I'm interested in writing my own simple strategies, is there any support for that?
No, not so far and I don't think Sampey will enable some programming in it, but I think if your strategy is profitable in long term, you can suggest it as an alternative. There were suggestions for arbitrage trades (using a coin that is paired by both BTC and LTC and/or XPM).
10. Current users: What do you like most about CAT? what do you dislike (if anything) about it? Are you more stressed out using it or less?
There are many things to test and debug as new features come, but, I expect later versions to be more automated (like sell all altcoins at the end of the session if wanted). By the way, a fully automated CAT that I believe once will exist (a TIGER release :-)):
- market advise feature: option to get first x markets with enough daily volume, where the price difference is not too big and the current price is not too high or low compared to the daily average
- portfolio diversify feature: option to buy some (equal) worth of each coin selected and automatically begin with ping buy and ping sell orders
- portfolio consolidation feature: sell all or sell all except the initial buy worth of the coin
- durability: ability to recover from crashes, cryptsy outages, market freezes/pauses etc.
- strategy: another (or combined) strategies, not just the ping pong
- smart: some user input check, like do not trade outside reasonable price window
- similar program input check, like not to add an unreasonably high buy order for 0.11 when the max buy is 0.10 for small amount and then 0.02
- multiplatform: and, in the further future, ability to trade another services (bter, coins-e, vircurex etc) and ability to find and trade arbitrage opportunies across different platforms (this would be a LION version :-))
