Bot consistently losing money with its trades

[petters]

I have had my bot running on Poloniex more or less non-stop for the last few months. I was under the impression that everything was working fine until I today downloaded all the bots trade history and analyzed it.

I found, to my horror, that the bot is slowly but steadily eating away at my account balance and loses money pretty much every day.

This plot shows a running sum (cumulative sum) of the bots daily total sell amount in BTC minus the total daily bought BTC amount. So if the bots sells for more than it buys, this should be positive, which it basically has never been, apart for getting lucky at the start of January when altcoins exploded for a few days.



I’m using the BB – Stepgain strategy with the following settings on Gunbot XT 7.02:

TRADING_LIMIT 0.02
FUNDS_RESERVE 0.001
PERIOD 5
BUY_LEVEL 0.6
GAIN 2.15
EMA1 24
EMA2 48
HIGH_BB 40
LOW_BB 40
STDV 2
SMAPERIOD 30
SELLLVL1 1.5
SELLLVL2 2.5
SELLLVL3 70
SELLLVL 2
PANIC_SELL OFF
DOUBLE_UP OFF
DOUBLE_UP_CAP 1
DU_CAP_COUNT 1
DU_METHOD HIGHBB
DU_BUYDOWN 2
RSI_BUY_ENABLED OFF
RSI_SELL_ENABLED OFF
RSI_BUY_LEVEL 30
RSI_SELL_LEVEL 70
STOP_LIMIT 60
BUY_ENABLED ON
OKKIES_MODE ON
BTC_MONEY_FLOW 35
MIN_VOLUME_TO_BUY 0.0001
MIN_VOLUME_TO_SELL 0.0001
TRADES_TIMEOUT 450
SELL_ENABLED ON
TA_ALWAYS_ON OFF

Could anyone tell me why in the name of all that is holy the bot seems to sell at a loss when I have asked it to sell with a gain of 2.15 %?

[sloaleks]

it doesn't, because it can't. bags are dragging your profits down (and you have double up disabled).

you should not let the bot run on its own, specially not for months (and set for buying on low bb 40). pair supervision and settings should be done daily.
strategy tune-up should be done according to market conditions. this is not a set and forget thing. or, you can run it that way ... but then no profit for you. specially not in bloodbath times, like late november, second half of january, ...

[petters]

it doesn't, because it can't. bags are dragging your profits down (and you have double up disabled).

you should not let the bot run on its own, specially not for months (and set for buying on low bb 40). pair supervision and settings should be done daily.
strategy tune-up should be done according to market conditions. this is not a set and forget thing. or, you can run it that way ... but then no profit for you. specially not in bloodbath times, like late november, second half of january, ...

Ah, that’s true, I didn’t include all the altcoins the bot is currently holding and haven’t sold yet into my calculation! And now that I looked that is quite a few bags. But how do you mean “it cant”? Is there a built-in safety mechanism in the bot that’s preventing it from ever selling at a loss?

[sloaleks]

of course there's a safety, it's called basic math. the bot knows at how much it bought and how many coins, and you have set it to sell at minimal gain such.such percent ... and the bot can math. so it can't sell at loss if you don't set it that way. for example, if you would have set minimal gain of 0.3 and the fees for the trade would be 0.4% combined, then you would have a bot selling at loss of 0.1%. in any other case, no way when the bot is running in auto trade ... except for tanking coins which fall really low, so the stop limit mechanism gets triggered, or if you activate panic sell, which will sell regardless of gain. panic sell needs to be activated from the setup, which means the bot is no more running on it's own, but you forced the sale of coins over it's working algorithm.