04-18-2018, 11:42 AM
Aloha,
I think Gekko is pretty cool. But it's missing something very important.
Access to trades.
Gekko gets data from the live market and builds candlesticks which it passes to your strategy. Your strategy, as far as I can tell, has no access to current trades and prices. Only when a candlestick is completed does price information get passed on. Once for each candle.
Most strategies use various sorts of indicator crossings to make buy and sell decisions. Candlesticks don't let you see exactly when a line crossing occurs. They're always late. That's why real-time charts have a moving marker for the current trade at the right edge. So you know when to get in and out of trades.
Gekko doesn't have this very important information.
With 15-minute candles your entries and exits can be as much as 15 minutes off! Even 1-minute candles are at a substantial disadvantage.
As others have noted, stop losses can hardly work under this system. You are most likely to get really long candles when a trade is going against you. So waiting for a candle to complete before testing for a stop is likely to be very costly. This is why Gekko strategies with long time-frame candles get some pretty terrible losing trades.
You simply can't make decent entries and exits without watching every trade.
I've written trading bots and charting systems. They both have always had full access to the trade stream. Candles are nice to display, but I don't think I've ever used them for anything else. You build them in the chart, not before. They're just for looking at.
Gekko is at a substantial and costly disadvantage without access to the trade stream.
Richard
I think Gekko is pretty cool. But it's missing something very important.
Access to trades.
Gekko gets data from the live market and builds candlesticks which it passes to your strategy. Your strategy, as far as I can tell, has no access to current trades and prices. Only when a candlestick is completed does price information get passed on. Once for each candle.
Most strategies use various sorts of indicator crossings to make buy and sell decisions. Candlesticks don't let you see exactly when a line crossing occurs. They're always late. That's why real-time charts have a moving marker for the current trade at the right edge. So you know when to get in and out of trades.
Gekko doesn't have this very important information.
With 15-minute candles your entries and exits can be as much as 15 minutes off! Even 1-minute candles are at a substantial disadvantage.
As others have noted, stop losses can hardly work under this system. You are most likely to get really long candles when a trade is going against you. So waiting for a candle to complete before testing for a stop is likely to be very costly. This is why Gekko strategies with long time-frame candles get some pretty terrible losing trades.
You simply can't make decent entries and exits without watching every trade.
I've written trading bots and charting systems. They both have always had full access to the trade stream. Candles are nice to display, but I don't think I've ever used them for anything else. You build them in the chart, not before. They're just for looking at.
Gekko is at a substantial and costly disadvantage without access to the trade stream.
Richard