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Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

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31–40 of 42 posts

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#31
It's a velocity-based system, one that looks at recent change history and tries to project into the near future. Those only work in markets where nobody else is doing that. You could make money in the US stock market doing that 30 years ago. Sometimes.

It doesn't look at the exchange's order book at all. Or use any outside data.

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. You could. For me, 1 BTC is a negligible amount that was worth not having to manage the abstraction overhead of a simulation mode.

But if you wanted to add a simulation mode, I'd certainly welcome the PR :)

A simulation sounds simpler than having to declare 23,413 trades on a tax form.

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#33

"My test portfolio was initialized with a 1 BTC deposit, and after 2 months and 23,413 trades, exited with 0.955 BTC. The system paid 2.486 BTC in fees to poloniex." I wonder whether a different trading strategy would decrease the fee overhead. Or perhaps the cryptocurrency exchanges are not setup for short-run trading? I know very little about the exchanges, but this does seem curious to me.

> I wonder whether a different trading strategy would decrease the fee overhead. Or perhaps the cryptocurrency exchanges are not setup for short-run trading? I know very little about the exchanges, but this does seem curious to me. OP here. One could presumably increase the margin for a classifier such that, to classify a sequence of price movements as a BUY or SELL, the predicted movement must be higher than what it…

Some chinese exchanges such as btcchina or huobi have very low trading fee or eventually doesn't take fee at all. Maybe one of the solutions will be just another exchange?

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder whether a different trading strategy would decrease the fee overhead. Or perhaps the cryptocurrency exchanges are not setup for short-run trading? I know very little about the exchanges, but this does seem curious to me. OP here. One could presumably increase the margin for a classifier such that, to classify a sequence of price movements as a BUY or SELL, the predicted movement must be higher than what it…

Some chinese exchanges such as btcchina or huobi have very low trading fee or eventually doesn't take fee at all. Maybe one of the solutions will be just another exchange?

Just checked - yeah, on huobi.com it's possible to trade BTC against CNY without any fees. Is it possible to adapt pytrader to huobi?

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#35
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the readme. Trader is not profitable (yet). Unless if you don't include fees in profitability calculation, which is clearly not a calculation based in a real use case.

Right, I saw that, I just can't see any motivation to make it profitable and then issue a pull request. Maybe I'm missing something?

If you don't expect it to remain profitable for very long (you might know other people working on the same thing), and isn't profitable enough in the short amount of time you have to make a large amount, I could see it looking excellent on a resume.

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#36
post #31

It's a velocity-based system, one that looks at recent change history and tries to project into the near future. Those only work in markets where nobody else is doing that. You could make money in the US stock market doing that 30 years ago. Sometimes. It doesn't look at the exchange's order book at all. Or use any outside data.

Hi, thanks for the comment.

You are correct that the cryptocurrency trading market is in it's infancy, like the stock market 30 years ago.

The database model already supports the following inputs: price, volume, bid/ask spread. If a potential future contributor to this repo wanted to build a classifier or NN on this data, they could do so with significantly less time, using this repo's code.

I have a database of price, volume, bid/ask spread history for the entire poloniex index, at a minute-by-minute- granularity, for the last 2 months. I will post if there is enough interest. Vote here if interested => https://github.com/owocki/pytrader/issues/3

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#37
post #6

I can't imagine why anyone would actually want to release a profitable trader. Isn't this kind of a tautologically dumb thing to do?

It's not dumb... if you have a pump and dump scheme for example, having more people do it with you actually increases your take-home results.

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#38
post #31

It's a velocity-based system, one that looks at recent change history and tries to project into the near future. Those only work in markets where nobody else is doing that. You could make money in the US stock market doing that 30 years ago. Sometimes. It doesn't look at the exchange's order book at all. Or use any outside data.

And it only lost 0.05btc in the span of 2 months.

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#39
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the readme. Trader is not profitable (yet). Unless if you don't include fees in profitability calculation, which is clearly not a calculation based in a real use case.

Right, I saw that, I just can't see any motivation to make it profitable and then issue a pull request. Maybe I'm missing something?

Even if it were currently profitable (after transaction fees), it may be more profitable to release it as a way to introduce new customers to a particular exchange (i.e. Poloniex). I'm not assuming this took place, but if the developer wanted maximum yield, working out some sort of incentive plan:

Flat free to release with "Built to work with Poloniex". Similar to "Click to deploy to Heroku" buttons.

Affiliate link /discount code to track conversions or reward accordingly

Re: Show HN: Pytrader – trade cryoptocurrencies automatically with machine learning

#40
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I saw that, I just can't see any motivation to make it profitable and then issue a pull request. Maybe I'm missing something?

You posit an interesting question about human nature, and about motivations in open source software. If someone gave you an half-written instruction manual and a toolkit that could turn an ordinary goose into a golden goose, (1) Would you have a go at it? (2) Would you share or hoard the golden eggs if you figured out the rest of the instructions? (3) If you did share them, would the sum of the contributions compound…

I'm sorry but that's a terrible analogy. The whole point of open-source software is aligning the interests of individual developers and groups to create something that can be shared and add value to anyone who uses it. Currency trading is a zero-sum game. You have winners and losers on each transaction. No new value is being created. There's no altruistic reason that would justify someone with a profitable strategy, ML or otherwise, to share their approach with others (fellow contributing developers, ostensibly, but we all know any shared profitable method is going to be exploited by leechers). You could argue that the process of trying to make a profit here advances the field of ML, and I'll grant you that, it might. But beyond that, there's no "profit for everyone" angle here - that's just human nature.
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