why buying high and selling low?

[sammiches]

A little more about what I'm seeing

So I tested PPO against the same pair & timeframe, both on coinigy and gekko backtest. On coinigy these super-small (1,3) settings provide a very "blocky" PPO which should be very easy to trade, but running the same settings in a backtest gives the following:

settings:
short = 1
long = 3
signal = 5

[thresholds]
down = -0.01
up = 0.01
persistence = 2

start time 2018-02-17 01:39:00
end time 2018-02-17 19:37:00
timespan 18 hours
start price 1.24353 USD
end price 1.23352 USD
market -0.80497%
amount of trades 50
sharpe ratio -18.07
start balance 101.24353 USD
final balance 85.87304 USD
simulated profit
-15.18170%

Roundtrips
Entry at (UTC) Exit at (UTC) Exposure Entry balance Exit balance P&L Profit
2018-02-17 01:42 2018-02-17 02:02 20 minutes 100.943 100.683 0.26 -0.26%
2018-02-17 02:18 2018-02-17 02:22 4 minutes 100.381 100.080 0.3 -0.30%
2018-02-17 02:27 2018-02-17 02:38 11 minutes 99.779 99.262 0.52 -0.52%
2018-02-17 02:42 2018-02-17 03:31 an hour 98.965 98.824 0.14 -0.14%
2018-02-17 03:41 2018-02-17 03:51 10 minutes 98.528 98.398 0.13 -0.13%
2018-02-17 04:05 2018-02-17 05:16 an hour 98.103 97.645 0.46 -0.47%
2018-02-17 05:18 2018-02-17 05:44 26 minutes 97.352 96.840 0.51 -0.53%
2018-02-17 05:47 2018-02-17 06:07 20 minutes 96.550 96.418 0.13 -0.14%
2018-02-17 06:51 2018-02-17 06:53 2 minutes 96.128 95.711 0.42 -0.43%
2018-02-17 07:03 2018-02-17 07:05 2 minutes 95.424 94.964 0.46 -0.48%
2018-02-17 07:07 2018-02-17 07:31 24 minutes 94.679 94.238 0.44 -0.47%
2018-02-17 07:35 2018-02-17 07:59 24 minutes 93.956 93.833 0.12 -0.13%
2018-02-17 09:24 2018-02-17 09:29 5 minutes 93.552 93.151 0.4 -0.43%
2018-02-17 12:50 2018-02-17 12:53 3 minutes 92.871 92.398 0.47 -0.51%
2018-02-17 13:32 2018-02-17 13:35 3 minutes 92.121 91.696 0.43 -0.46%
2018-02-17 13:37 2018-02-17 13:39 2 minutes 91.420 91.000 0.42 -0.46%
2018-02-17 16:06 2018-02-17 16:08 2 minutes 90.727 90.454 0.27 -0.30%
2018-02-17 16:14 2018-02-17 16:41 27 minutes 90.182 89.914 0.27 -0.30%
2018-02-17 16:56 2018-02-17 17:00 4 minutes 89.644 89.387 0.26 -0.29%
2018-02-17 17:06 2018-02-17 17:10 4 minutes 89.119 88.848 0.27 -0.30%
2018-02-17 17:18 2018-02-17 17:20 2 minutes 88.582 88.316 0.27 -0.30%
2018-02-17 17:25 2018-02-17 17:29 4 minutes 88.051 87.787 0.26 -0.30%
2018-02-17 17:37 2018-02-17 18:23 an hour 87.524 87.236 0.29 -0.33%
2018-02-17 18:34 2018-02-17 19:16 42 minutes 86.974 86.618 0.36 -0.41%
2018-02-17 19:31 2018-02-17 19:33 2 minutes 86.358 85.873 0.48 -0.56%

..and it's always like this, NEVER one profitable trade - if the buy/sell order were reversed, it would seem near perfect.