Quote from: WindGlider on May 17, 2013, 07:51:39 PM

Thanks a lot for the extension. Especially for the modified version. May I suggest one small improvement? Storing current price in localstorage after buy order was executed and checkbox in options page to skip sell if current sell price lower than pervious buy price.

Code:

....
if ((tradingEnabled==1)&&(ApiKey!='')) {
if ((skipSellEnabled==1)&&(currentPrice>lastBuyPrice)) {
console.log("SELL! (EMA("+EmaShortPar+")/EMA("+EmaLongPar+")<-"+MinSellThreshold+"% for "+tickCountSell+" or more ticks)");
...

I get many requests about this. However, a function like that will divert from the strategy of a EMA-bot, and it's not quite as easy to implement I think. You are probably looking for a whole different kind of bot with another strategy.

Personally, I'm not all for a function like this because it's just as important for an EMA-bot to sell when it detects a trend down, as it should buy when it detects a trend up, and according to the EMA-bot's strategy, the decision really has nothing to do with the price you previously paid. Your suggestion is based on the assumption that all drops are just temporary and short, but I think that's a VERY risky assumption! If the price drops, it may very well stay low for a long time. And no matter what you paid for your BTC when you bought them, you really should sell if you think the price will drop further (it's better to sell "now" and buy again on an even lower price, and be able to trade again as soon as the price starts recovering). Just imagine having used your "rule" when the price dropped from $250 a few weeks ago. Your bot would now be sitting here waiting for the price to reach those levels again, but it can take a very long time. In my opinion, it would be better if the bot had sold (with a small loss), and could start working again as soon as an up-trend was detected (maybe somewhere around $70-$80).

And also, I do agree with Goomboo in is thread describing the strategy of this EMA-bot (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60501): A simple, straight-forward strategy gives the best results in the long run.
Sure, you can add all kinds of "intelligence" and "smartness" to a bot, but if the "smartness" is based on your own emotional assumptions (e.g. that the price will always go up soon), you WILL get hit very hard if/when your assumptions turn out to be wrong. In my opinion, the whole point of a bot is that it should take emotions like this away, thus lowering the risk (because we humans are very poor at making logic decisions when we "believe" something, and we tend to take way too high risks without even realizing it). So I do like the simplicity and logic behind this original bot. Sure, it WILL do bad trades sometimes, and sure, it could always have done better trades when looking back at the charts, but the relevant question is: would you or another bot have done better? And will you do better in the long run? The idea behind this bot is that it simply should make more good trades than bad ones, and that it should make a steady profit in the long run, without taking high risks like we humans tend to do. It's tempting to try to "speed up" the bot to make more money quickly, but be warned: very short sample intervals tend to catch mostly noise, and there are really no solid trends to act on.

I am, however, considering adding an "experimental" section to the bot, where additional, home-made rules/strategies like this could be added (and used at your own risk, as it WILL seriously cripple the EMA-bot!!). But the question is: How should these other strategies/rules be used in combination with the EMA-bot strategy? I would also like to add some kind of stop-loss feature to that section, but I haven't quite figured out how it should work when the different strategies collide (as they often will!)...