Quote from: patriotek on January 02, 2014, 05:18:52 AM

@ whydifficult

Forgive me please, if you will, for the tone of my last... Had a rough day (one of many), and this issue was just the bitter icing on a dirt cake. Ya' know what they say about excuses and back-sides...lol

I do understand that Gekko is a WIP, and may possibly crash. I also understand that default settings may not be the best for a given set of circumstances.

I guess what I do not yet understand is why, in 2 separate situations on 2 different exchanges (and I believe on different systems), it consistently lost money rather than making any gains whatsoever, and crashed:

1. CEX.io in sim-mode with settings changed according to recommendations made here in this thread

2. BTC-e in trading mode with defaults, but with no indication that I've yet seen that the defaults are not appropriate for it.

Might I ask the following, as it sounds like you're re-writing much of it already:

How difficult might it be to set it up such that depending upon which exchange / currency pair you set it to run with, it sets safe or at least lower risk defaults accordingly? As well, it might be valuable to set up the startup scripts so that if the service fails, it can be stopped and restarted. I haven't had any time (nor do I have much supporting knowledge) to check into how this might be done, but it was an idea that I had...

If I weren't so behind on modern software development (last I programmed was Basic on C-64 and crApple 2c's...hehe), I'd dig in and help. For that matter, I'm still hoping to, to some minimal extent. If I weren't so dead broke, I'd donate now. I will donate once Gekko's helping me dig outta' this pit I'm in!!

Again, my apologies for previous attitude, and appreciation for your work on this!

(I'm sorry if I sound a bit grumpy, this is not to you personally but I'm going to link to this general answer every time this happens.)

Gekko is not a money making machine. Gekko is a tool for traders to automate buying and selling according to simple mathmetical methods.

Gekko works as long as it is able to run the implemented algorithmes correctly over either realtime market data or historical market data. Configuring the algorithmes in a way they are profitable is not up to Gekko and also not up to me (I wrote the default config).

The default config was based on this thread by a trader. It appears during the last few months the proposed settings are not as profitable as they once were. So if you are losing money there might be two cases:

- You configured an algorithm in a way that it won't generate profit. -> blame yourself, read that thread and first backtest potential new configurations before letting Gekko play with your money again - also use the paper trading (Gekko will simulate profits without your money at risk).
- There is a bug in Gekko so it implements the algos wrongly or interpets the market data wrong, etc. -> blame me & tell me about what is wrong.

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I'm getting tired of people leeching Gekko when the default settings are profitable and not taking part in any discussion and start complaining when it isn't anymore. Everybody is free to come up with more profitable settings and I'll put them in the default config.

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Quote from: patriotek on January 02, 2014, 05:18:52 AM

edit: Shoulda' gone to bed, but... This got my attention in the config's:
sellTreshold: -0.25,
buyTreshold: 0.25

Forgive my financial ignorance (I'm quickly learning), but might these be reversed? In my mind, you'd want to sell at EMA+N.nn rather than -N.nn, and buy at -N.nn, but I can't be sure that I'm interpreting things correctly, or even in the same ball-park...

So those thresholds are part of the EMA method, a trendwatching algo. It is trying to detect trends: if it thinks the price is going up it will advice to buy (so you can sell later when the price is higher and have profit) and if the price is going down it will advice to sell.

sellThreshold determines how fast the trend has to be going down for it to sell (hence negative).
buyThreshold determines how fast the trend has to be going up for it to buy (hence positve).

Note you might not find these parameters in Goomboo's thread, that's mainly because in a flat market Gekko will detect any minor price movement as a new trend, advice to buy/sell and the exchange will eat all your money away in fees.

Quote from: gatuso5 on January 02, 2014, 11:18:30 AM

how to set a maximum transaction volume in BTC/USD??
Example: maxUSD: 50

So program will not use all acc money.

Not possible in this version, coming up in the next. The only thing you can do for now is get all your other funds out of the exchange.