09-30-2018, 06:16 PM
When live trading Gekko handles signals from your strategy. Your strategy can signal to buy or sell. When it does Gekko will kick of a trade execution using a sticky order: This is an advanced order type (internal to Gekko) which will try to buy (or sell) using limit orders at the ticker/top of the book/bbo.
Gekko ignores the candle price at the time your strategy fired the buy (or sell) signal. This because that price is simply the last trade price of the last traded candle. (Which by definition is never the price of the last trade, but the second last or even older).
In other words: when your strategy decides to buy, Gekko will pull the ticker (current top of the orderbook) and place an order at this top. When Gekko places a bid (to buy) and the price moves UP gekko will keep moving this bid higher until it's completely filled.
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This is a very conservative strategy, an other (and simpler) approach is to create market orders: this way you can buy (or sell) straight away, trading with people currently offering to trade in the orderbook. This works great when you trade on a big market (for example USD/BTC on bitfinex), but terrible when you trade on a small alt market. Mainly because of two costs involved: crossing the spread and eating slippage. These costs can be as high as 3% (but only on a small market).
I uploaded a video where I explain these costs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0yc1sonYvo
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To guard against this risk, specifically for new users who are not aware of the details behind executing trades Gekko currently does NOT support market orders at all. Though a lot of people have been requesting it, so here is a discussion: How can Gekko support market orders, while minimizing the risk to new traders losing all their money in a few days?
Gekko ignores the candle price at the time your strategy fired the buy (or sell) signal. This because that price is simply the last trade price of the last traded candle. (Which by definition is never the price of the last trade, but the second last or even older).
In other words: when your strategy decides to buy, Gekko will pull the ticker (current top of the orderbook) and place an order at this top. When Gekko places a bid (to buy) and the price moves UP gekko will keep moving this bid higher until it's completely filled.
------
This is a very conservative strategy, an other (and simpler) approach is to create market orders: this way you can buy (or sell) straight away, trading with people currently offering to trade in the orderbook. This works great when you trade on a big market (for example USD/BTC on bitfinex), but terrible when you trade on a small alt market. Mainly because of two costs involved: crossing the spread and eating slippage. These costs can be as high as 3% (but only on a small market).
I uploaded a video where I explain these costs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0yc1sonYvo
------
To guard against this risk, specifically for new users who are not aware of the details behind executing trades Gekko currently does NOT support market orders at all. Though a lot of people have been requesting it, so here is a discussion: How can Gekko support market orders, while minimizing the risk to new traders losing all their money in a few days?