21 Jan

automated script for the Litecoin market

Over Christmas, I started looking into how stock markets work and decided to give it a shot. The simplest way I found to start off on it was actually the cryptocoin market. I chose Coinbase’s GDAX market as the one I’d work on.

At first, I had a naive idea that I just needed to watch the numbers on the market for times when the latest figure is the lowest in a long time. Then you buy. And then the opposite happens -if the latest bar is the highest in a long time, sell.

It turns out that doesn’t work. I wrote a testing application that downloaded 6 months of per-minute data about the LTC-EUR market and ran simulations against it to figure out what would happen if I was to trade based on my algorithms. The first one (above) sucked.

So I started looking a bit further into how traders actually do it themselves.

It turns out it’s pretty simple, if you’re willing to put the testing time in and come up with some good configuration numbers.

The first thing I checked out was called “MACD” (Moving Average Convergence Divergence). That uses a simple moving average (SMA) of the market value to generate two lines – a “long” average based on 26 figures, and a “short” average based on 12 figures. When the short average crosses over the long, it signals an action. For example, if the current short value is higher than the current long, and the last calculations were the opposite (short under long), then that indicates you should Buy, because it looks like there is an upwards trend. The opposite happens when the crossover shows the short going under the long. Sell.

The 12 and 26 figures are traditional. You could work based on them, but my tests showed that there are different figures that can give you better results. I guess it depends on the market. My current settings here are 25/43 instead of 12/26.

The next thing I worked on was a “Chandelier Exit”. This is a strategy for cutting your losses when the market suddenly drops more than usual. To do this, you measure the “ATR” (average true range) for the last n periods (traditionally 22). You then multiply the ATR by a volatility value (traditionally 3), subtract that from the current High value, and if the current market value is below that, Sell. My current values for this are a volatility of 5.59 based on an ATR of 18 bars.

I then looked at exponential moving average based MACD. The standard moving average is a straightforward average of n numbers, but the EMA puts more weight on the more recent numbers, so it reacts quicker to changes in the market.

After trying to tune the EMA for a while, I found that if I use EMA instead of SMA, then I get worse results, because the script would buy quickly when it saw an upward trend, but that might turn out to be just jitter and you’ll lose it all immediately afterwards. It’s safe to sell when the market drops, it’s not safe to buy when the market looks like it’s just starting to rise. it’s better to take your time.

So, I added a switch to my code so that I could decide whether to use SMA or EMA for buys and sells, etc.

I found that the combination that gives the best results uses only SMA for buys, but then uses all of SMA, EMA and Chandelier exits to signal a sell. Oh – EMA of 40 and 80.

Doing this, I’ve been able to come up with a configuration of my script that gives an average return of about 1.1%. This means that if you were to invest €5000, then there would be “interest” of about €55 per day. Or if you can keep your money in the game, it starts to grow. €50 invested for 365 days at 1.1% interest per day is €2711.

If you’re interested in going the script a shot, you can download it from here.

I keep on having more ideas on how to improve this.

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