Post
Topic
Board Trading Discussion
Re: Chrome Browser extension: MtGox trading bot
by
TobbeLino
on 20/05/2013, 15:59:50 UTC

How about peaks 1 & 2? They have to be ignored! Peak 4 (which is the actual price maximum btw) is going to be ignored? (should be!)
Any help is appreciated, thank you.


Well, finding the actual, true peaks in the EMA-diff graph is just as hard as finding the true peaks in the price graph.
If we could do that without errors, we would all be rich Smiley
Right, but do you agree with the idea of considering not only the current value of ema-diff, but its trend, too?

It's hard to say as it's a totally different strategy, but I think no (at least for this kind of bot).
Isn't the point when the derivative of the EMA-diff = 0 (i.e. when it has a peak or a bottom) probably the same point as when the price itself turns up or down?
In that case the bot could just as well simply look at the price itself: If it's turning down: Sell! It's turning up: Buy!
But unfortunately trading is not that easy, and that's exactly what the EMA-bot tries to help us with in the first place...

Goomboo's EMA-strategy is designed to not make too hasty decisions, so it will never be able to hit the exact peaks or bottoms. It's designed to wait until a trend has been identified, and that takes (per definition) time. The whole reason for the bot reacting "slowly" (and sometimes buys at the top and sells at the bottom - out-of-sync with the market) is because detecting the "true" peaks/bottoms IS the whole problem here, and it's a very hard problem! (and in some way it's an "impossible" problem, because the very moment people find a way to predict the market, the market itself will change because of this).
The problem of finding the peaks/bottoms is very deceptive because it looks SOOO easy when looking at a chart afterwards Smiley But as we all know, it's a whole different story to try to predict where the price will go "from here"...

So, I think the bottom line is that any attempt at trying to "speed up" the EMA-bot and make it react faster to the market is actually short circuiting the whole strategy of the bot. It's not designed to react quickly, and making hasty decisions is what humans do! Smiley