Rough week: How much was the market and how much was Gunbot?

[BeagleMan]

I bought a Gunbot license a week ago and have been running v4.0.5 24/7 ever since with an almost default BB. (I was told by the reseller to increase the gain setting from the 0.6 initial value.) I have tried to use high quality, solid reputation, top volume coins. I have swapped some in and out, but there have been usually at most 10 BTC-coin pairs at a time.

Over the course of the week, I have seen the value of my Bittrex account decrease by nearly 40%. I understand that the market took an incredible downturn over the last few days so I know some of the blame lies there, but I'm wondering how much. How has everyone else fared over the last crazy week?

I noticed that when a coin had a downward trend, the bot would continue to buy and my portfolio would become overexposed to declining currencies. That overbuying process would deplete my BTC stores which meant that the bot was unable to take advantage of some of the other coins' really solid gains. It essentially froze itself up by overbuying tanking coins. I have since changed the STOP_LIMIT to 30 to avoid those situations.

For those of you who were profitable over the last week, can you offer any advice on how to right this ship?

[monsterc]

Join the Elite telegram group and you will can find a lot more info/help.  The issue you are having with the bot keep buying as a coin goes down is due to the DOUBLE_UP option, turn it off for now until you are more seasoned. 

[WildCowboy]

Somewhat similar story for me, just got the Bittrex license last week and on the second day bitcoin crashes. My loss is was about 10% but I didn't put that much money in my Bittrex account.

So I was trading BTC-altcoin pairs and USDT-bit/altcoin pairs. All BB-BB strategy which I thought was safe. The markets went down below BTC = $3300 and after I woke up and all my pairs were in USDT, preserving their value. So I manually bought BTC and altcoins with 10% profit around the BTC = $3000 mark. There were some trades with minor profit. And as the market went up above BTC = 3050, Gunbot started to stockpile USDT again at but BTC went up 20% to 3600 within an hour . I still don't know why it dumped all BTC into USDT but it could be the stop limit.

So a hard lesson for me: no more USDT trading using the bot for now. And stop the bot whenever there is a crash about to happen. Hope that helps so you don't feel too bad about your loss 

Now Gunbot made a couple of percent profit and if this trend continues I'll be good next month.

[BeagleMan]

Apparently trading different markets (BTC-, ETH-, USDT-) requires separate licenses to be successful. Trading a mixture of them with one bot can cause problems where all your assets end up funneled into one thing or another less efficiently.

I have yet to gain any profits. At this point it's been running for nearly two weeks and I'm down almost 50%. I keep reading message boards trying to figure out what the problem is, but I can't seem to find a smoking gun.

You mentioned that things have turned around now-- how many coin pairs are you trading at a time?

[WildCowboy]

Right now I'm running 13 BTC and 8 ETH pairs plus BTC-ETH. Most ETH pairs run as BTC pairs as well. I've noticed my ETH balance getting larger to about double the BTC balance. Almost all pairs are using a BB-Stepgain strategy where I optimized the values according to the behavior of the market. Part of learning this is that I'm paying attention to the trades a lot as they happen. When GB places a buy or sell order I go to the particular exchange and check out how the ask/bid price GB put in there looks on the chart. On Bittrex using 15 minute candlesticks and standard Bollinger bands (period=20) is not perfect usually good enough for me.

Last night has been really good after joining this telegram group: https://t.me/cryptoadvisorOfficial Some people pointed out a couple of coins to trade: OK, PAY, TRST and CFI. During the night these were trading a lot. But I almost bagged the TRST because it was moving so much that with BB as a buy strategy with LowBB = 30% it was buying way too soon. Therefore the lot almost didn't sell because the buy price was too high. So now I know I have to lower the LowBB or change to stepgain for buying.

My profits since the big dip last friday are up about 3%. But they are a bit obscured by a bag of RDD that I want to get rid of as soon as it increases.

You say you're down 50%, that's gotta hurt... So what's going on, are you bagging a lot of bad coins? Did you investigate the buying decisions GB made to see what was going on?

 

[BeagleMan]

I really appreciate your input! I joined that Telegram group, but haven't had much time to spend in there yet. I hope to focus on this over the weekend.

I've been trading anywhere between 10-15 pairs at a time, but I only do the BTC pairs. I tried having BTC and ETH pairs at once and it went bonkers. I woke up to a bunch of sales at losses and almost everything had been shuffled over to ETH.

I try to focus on pairs with a high volume and generally increasing trend. Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever and when the coins go down, I don't know how to get away from them. It seems like GB will do rapid buy/sell transactions on a rise, but then get stuck with the last lot which was bought at the highest price so it never gets sold. Then, because it's moving lower, GB quits interacting with the pair. I've switched over to ping-pong in some of those cases with positive results, but not everything works well for that strategy.

I would love to see even the 1% gains that people talk about, let alone your recent 3% days. That's terrific.

[WildCowboy]

As of today my bitcoins are in bags that are rapidly falling...   

[paramecie]

Yes: BTC is falling.

If you're awake, when BTC falls it may be a good idea to turn GB off before it buys all the altcoins ;-)
I think Gunthar posted somewhere about the danger of pumps and dumps.

[WildCowboy]

That's exactly what happened, all my bitcoins went into altcoins. I'm lucky that Gunbot previously had funneled all my coins into ETH so my ETH balance is twice my other Altcoin balance. Right now I'm back where I started at a couple of days ago. I've set a 30% security margin on two altcoins but there is still a chance that they bounce up. I might even do a manual sell if they go to 95% of buying price.

Learned a lot yesterday. I need to spend more time investigating the pairs. Looking at moving averages, that kind of thing. I still have the bot running but only with very low values of LowBB. That way it only buys when there is a higher chance of a bounce up although the likelihood of buying is smaller.