Proper stop losses coming soon

[BotsEdge]

So you specify your target gain with the trigger, e.g. a target of +1% and the trailing will narrow when the target is reached. So it starts with a trailing of 2% for example and narrows the trailing to 0.2% when the price reaches 1.2% gain. So the price is still able to climb and trails but on a further small price drop it will sell and save the target gain.

Very cool!

Did pretty much trailing stop loss coding/testing last days. Just adding it into any existing strategy will optimize a couple of percent, at least what I have tested. So I was thinking of a strategy to take real advantage of this feature. @askmike, what are your use cases for this feature?

The biggest one being risk management: Gekko strategies should be trying to ride trends upwards, however after going "all in" riding the trend strategies need some ways to dynamically control risk. People have been asking for stop losses for years, and people have been implementing them inside their strategies up until now. Note that stoplosses aren't new or anything, I just noticed that a lot of people want them so I added them. Having them native and not in a strategy opens a lot of doors, such as using native stop losses on exchanges that support them (currently not done yet, but planned in the future).

That said I am trying to not take part in the debate on what indicators / strategies are good and what is bad. A stop loss is a tool that traders have been using for decades. As such I want people who use Gekko to have the ability to use them. I think that they make sense in a lot of scenarios, but you can always get stopped by a flash crash before the price continues to go up. There are definitely scenarios where they cause more harm than good.

Following the whole thread i´d like to contribute.


First of all if you ask me as a seasoned trader i would like to see the following order types in Gekko:
1. Limit order
2. Stoploss order ( a Stop Loss Limit order is not needed since most traders will not use the stop limit window)
3. Profit Stop order (Trailing stop already integrated)(again a Profit Stop Limit order is not needed for most traders)
4. Limit Maker order

Then for the first quote above. The system of trailing down the profit factor can be done by using an existing TA Indicator called Parabolic SAR. It is included with the Tulip Indicator library that we all installed when installing Gekko. The Parabolic SAR was invented by Welles J. Wilder and is widely used in the trading world. It basically is a reversal system with an accelerator factor that closes in on the price while in a constant trend. When the accelerator function finally hits the price it reverses. 
The problem with this as a profit factor feature is, that it can only work if we have any means of defining the profit itself.
Sure we can say let´s define a 1% gain target but 1% might not be enough or it might be too much.


In order for this to be a valid feature that is helpful it needs to be coordinated with a portfoliomanagement system.

For the stoploss orders i agree. Any trading bot that wants to ride any kind of trend needs a stoploss order system as a native feature. 
Statistically markets are in trend situations for about 20% of the time and in sideway mode for about 80% of the time, so in order to "work" a market with any kind of automated system the bot needs a working stoploss system that is connected to a moneymanagement system so it can actually find out whether it wants to trade with the kind of market volatility that it sees.

Looking through a lot of strategies for the Gekko bot i have to say that most of the stuff is not new but general technical analysis knowledge and i very much doubt that any one is profitable for a long period of time. Reason being is not that they are programmed the wrong way or that they don´t work in general on crypto, the reason is that none of these are connected to moneymanagement.
In the tradingworld apart from cryptocurrencies TA is used a lot but it is never used alone without any riskmanagement or moneymanagement. Plus the more complex a TA Indicator gets the more prone to failure it is. Most of the time complexity only means "overfiltering" the strategy for a given time period (backtesting).

So what Gekko needs is kind of an advanced tab where a trader can put in his money-, risk-, portfoliomanagement parameters.