29 Jan

using LIMIT trades to reduce fees

I made two enhancements to my Litecoin market script over the weekend.

The first one was based on something I did last week, where it occured to me that if you buy when the ATR is low, you will probably lose money through fees because the market value will not shift enough for there to be a profit.

For example, if the value is 200 when you buy and 201 when you sell, then you will lose money. Let’s say you you €10 of coins. It will increase in value to €10.05 by the time you sell them, but you will pay just over €0.06 in fees.

An ATR limit large enough to discourage the script from buying when the margin is so small would stop this issue.

However, I realised that a limit that worked at around a value of 200 would not be effective at 400.

The solution was to make a new limit which is inversely proportional to the market value. Let’s say the number is 50. Then it would look for an ATR of 0.25 if the market value was 200, and an ATR of 0.125 if the value was 400.

This made a remarkable difference in my simulation. It now estimates a 3.15% return per day based on the configuration figures I found.

Last week’s version ended up with about 14 buys in a 50 day period, which meant that there was only about one buy every 4 days, making it look like it wasn’t doing anything.

Now, it has what looks like about 32 events per day. A lot of them are repeats, where a sell signal might pop up from a chandelier exit followed by another from exponential moving average or simple moving average, but it’s still a lot more, making the script feel a lot more alive.

This is helped by me changing the trade method.

I had it on MARKET trades, which are virtually guaranteed sales/buys, but also are guaranteed 0.3% fees.

I’ve changed that to LIMIT trades that work in a way that might not trade at exactly what was requested, but should not trigger a fee at all (at least, I haven’t had a single fee yet in my tests!).

How it works: let’s say the market value is 200 right now. The script will check the order books, which might currently have an “ask” of 200.01 and a “bid” of 199.99 (for example). If we are trying to sell, then we add an sell/ask order of 200.02 (current+0.01). If the market value goes down, then we cancel that order and create a new one based on whatever the new value is.

And vice versa with buys/bids.

This means we probably won’t get exactly what we want, because we are relying on market jitter to make the trade happen. But at least we won’t have a fee to worry about!

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