Spot Grid DCA Mutation Project
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Welcome ladies and gentlemen. Some of you may have been asking yourself: What is this project about? First things first, Spot Grid DCA is a trading strategy that mainly is based on buying very fast, even buying more expensive than previous selling price sometimes, and doing DCA (Dollar Cost Average). Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And in fact it is, but at the same time this strategy have been getting very good feedbacks and results and in my opinion it has a lot of positive points.
Many of you may be surprised by the fact that this strategy buys so fast, I also did, but there is a reason for it: If you are always in, you can take advantage of any price raise, and this strategy does it really good. At the same time, if the price drops, it buys at a lower price, getting a better average bought price, and thanks to this, it can sell with profit on most of the cases when the price raises a bit after a drop. The good news is that most of the times cryptocurrency prices are constantly going up and down. The bad news is the price may experience a sudden big drop and we could get stuck for hours, days or weeks, until the price reachs to our average bought price to “release the beast” again.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s see how a slightly modified version of this strategy performs on Gunbot. I want to apologize in advance as the video you are about to see is in Spanish as I didn’t have time to make it in English yet, but I think it’s more than enough to see some buy and sell points and get an idea of how this strategy looks like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyNobpz5Js8&t=260s
I feel now it’s the perfect time to tell you something. Disclaimer: Any info shared here must not be taken as a financial advise as I’m not a trading guru nor a financial advisor and this is meant to be a place to share personal opinions and ideas. The use of this strategy or any modified version does not guarantee you will get profit. Crypto related investments always imply high risk and you should do your own research before taking any investment decision.
At this point you may be thinking: “Ok Aitor, very good, but what the h… is this project about?“. Long story short: When I started testing this strategy I had several ideas to improve it (I will talk about this later) and our beloved Javier and his “evil mind” had the brilliant idea of taking this to the next level and creating a small group / team of Gunbotters willing to share ideas, test and contribute somehow to this. The goal is get a final modified / mutated version with better performance.
This said, I want to clarify 4 points:
1- This project is something private for https://gunbot.shop and https://gunbot.es customers. We, as the biggest Gunbot community and Gunbot Master Dealers, decided to do this on our own. There isn’t any other Gunbot dealer or reseller involved. Just wanted to make this clear.
2- There is a reason to keep the group small: When a strategy gets too mainstream, and it’s used by thousands of botters, the performance could drop (or at least some people believe it). That’s why we will keep it for a small group of people.
3- As you can image, what I explained in the previous point has some consequences. The group will be closed once we reach to certain number, and there is a filter to join the group. We are looking for committed people. If you want to join us, you can contact me: @AitorRuiz or @JavierAlv via telegram so we can discuss about adding you to the group.
4- What we are looking for is for a group of friends sharing ideas and enjoying this hobby of automating trading. For me keeping the good ambient is crucial. If one of the members of the group doesn’t respect other members, insult others etc… he is out. Sorry but this kind of projects can last several months and no way I’m dealing with a dick for so long. This is meant to be an enjoyable thing for all and if you don’t respect others we own you nothing. I hope this point is crystal clear as we will have zero tolerance with annoying members.
What is the current state of the project? At the time of writting this post, on 11th March 2021, the first persons who joined the team are running / testing an initial version and we are working on implement some of the best ideas for v2.0. This should be done within few days. Next steps?
a) After deeply testing v2, apply some improvements / fixes if needed and add some other improvements for v3.
b) We plan to create some variants with different approaches. For example, one variant could be focused on getting a lot of trades and never stop. This could require a stop loss, and the point would be to make it worth to assume a loss from time to time VS keep the bot stuck from time to time. Other variant would be to slightly increase the weight of each DCA in order to get a better average bought price and get rid of the bags easier and faster. Other variant could be very conservative and have a bigger spread for DCA, making it capable of continue DCAing even after a huge drop like 50, 60 or 70%. The idea of all this is to test the performance of each approach and try to implement the strongest points of each approach to the Final version.
c) At this point, if everything goes good, we should have a very cool Final version and we could analyze if it’s worth it to implement additional features like switching between different variants / approaches to react and try to adapt to especific market conditions, support and resistances etc…
The plan is to start sharing results and generic ideas (obviously we won’t discuss very specific details in public) for initial versions here, and then we will switch to a private forum once the group is closed.
In the following post I will talk a bit about some interesting ideas that have been shared and how we could approach them.
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Before start talking about ideas and improvements I would like to explain why I think this strategy can give some mental peace compared to other strategies. Obviously it also depends on how you interpret it, but I will explain later why I think it.
On another note, in my opinion, during a bull run USD base pairs are a good choice. The trend is your friend, you know. Ok, supposing we add the pair USDT-BTC, my points are:
1- When BTC price is raising, this strategy takes advantage of it and keeps making profitable trades constantly.
2- When BTC is in a range, it keeps doing profitable trades. For example if BTC price is ping ponging between 30000 and 31000 range, it’s a very sweet spot for this strategy.
3- When BTC price goes down slowly, it gets a better average bought price and it gets rid of the bag with profit when the price bounces a bit, and at the same time starts a new cycle with a better starting point than the previous one. Note that the price never goes straight down or straight up, I mean, regardless the trend is upwards or downwards, the price is always bouncing up and down.
4- When BTC price drops a lot (worst scenario for this strategy running USDT-BTC pair) it can get stuck if it doesn’t get a good enough average bought price to sell with profit and start a new cycle. I have been running several versions and testing this strategy during almost 1 month, and at some point 4 of the 6 coins I was running got stuck. Two of the coins that got stuck got a good enough average price to sell with profit and start a new cycle quite fast (I think they were stuck for 2 days aprox). The other 2 coins took around 10 days to be released. At some point we could even manually sell a stuck coin taking a small loss as a cycling coin means profitable trades and it may worth it to take a small loss first to start cycling again and keep getting profitable trades as soon as possible. In this case it wasn’t needed, just thinking out loud.
At this point, after taking a look to all the possible scenarios, we can conclude that scenarios 1 & 2 are perfect, scenerio 3 is good enough, and scenario 4 is not that good. The question now is: How do we plan to “fix” or minimize effects when scenario 4 happens? I would like to mention 2 points:
a) Working on strategy variants / modifications that can make it to handle better these kind of scenarios.
b) Talking again about “mental peace”. I’m going to tell you my point of view. Some time ago I felt like BTC future eas uncertain. In other words, BTC was a flipping coin. The question is: Is it now? Maybe taking a look at these news you can get an idea of what I mean:
– Tesla buys $1.5 billion in Bitcoin and plans to accept it as payment. Full article here.
– Switzerland’s ‘Crypto Valley’ Has Started Accepting Bitcoin and Ether for Tax Payments. Full article here.
– Florida Tax Collector to Accept Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash Payments. Full article here.
– Citibank says Bitcoin price will pass 300k$. Full article here.
– 11 major companies that accept Bitcoin in 2021. Full article here.
– Blackrock says Bitcoin will take the place of gold. Full article here.
I could post more news, but I think you get my point. What I mean is, in my opinion, it’s quite obvious that there is a high probabilty of Bitcoin price will reach to 150k$ at some point (maybe in 1 year or maybe in 10 years). My point of view is, during the journey to 150k I can keep getting a lot of trades, the longer the journey it takes, the better, as more trades I will get. The longer BTC is stuck into a range, the better as more trades I will get. The more ups and downs, the better. And taking a look to BTC price history… ups and downs are a constant. Would I be able to keep my mental peace while traveling through scenario 4’s desert? Definitely my answer is yes.
Obviously I’m aware of how risky crypto related investments are, I mean, someone could hack Bitcoin and be able to create more BTC, or maybe some regulations could hurt it… But at this point, and considering how big companies and even goverments are committing to BTC, I think the probability or something like that happening is really low and I accept that risk.
On the other hand, even if it’s too soon to take definitive conclusions, the data we have collected until now seems to point to the fact that the higher the volatility is, the more trades it makes and the higher the profit. Those who picked coins with high volatility got more trades and higher profits, but obviously they are taking more risk. And it’s not the same to be stuck with BTC than being stuck with Dogecoin…
Some people just added one pair: USDT-BTC, others added also ETH and other “mainstream” coins, and others added some random volatile coins. This is a personal call, as always.
The important thing here is that you feel comfortable with the risk you are taking.
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Let’s take a look at some results I got during testing, First of all let’s see some trades (right column is the profit in USDT).
As you can see, in my case the average profit per trade is around 2 and 4 USDT, and for time to time I got a big trade of 12 or 34 USDT.
Let’s see daily profit from 1st March to 13th March in Gunbot dashboard:
And now let’s take a look to daily PNL and daily profits for the period 15th February 2021 to 12th March 2021 on Binance:
As you can see, Gunbot dashboard and Binance show different numbers. The reason is that Gunbot doesn’t count the profit / loss until the trade is closed while Binance takes into account the value of your current assets regardless you close your trades or not. This is why the numbers (lose or profit) are usually higher in Binance, but at the end, the final results should be the same.
Before ending this post I would like to ask something a guy told me today “But this strategy won’t work during a bear market, will it?”. And my answer is: Can you define “Bull market”? Please tell me which graph is Bull Market and which one is Bear Market:
Obviously the graph below belongs to a bull market. It’s so obvious… or not? It’s the exact same graph!!! It’s just a mirror!!! One chart is USDT-BTC and the other one is BTC-USDT. We are trading now USDT-BTC because BTC price is raising and we accumulate USDT. And what happens during BTC bear market? BTC bear market means USD Bull market… remember the mirror? So why not trade BTC-USDT and accumulate BTC during “USD Bull Market”? Ohh wait… BTC-USDT pair doesn’t exist… but we have BTC-SUSD. What is SUSD? It’s a new stablecoin based on USD value. Some time ago we had BTC-TUSD and Binance removed it, but now we have BTC-SUSD, so who cares?. It’s important to note that BTC-SUSD pair has very low volume at this moment, and that means high volatility and high risk. Anyway, once the next Bear market starts, I’m sure this pair will get a lot more volume as it’s really a very interesting pair to trade with.
UPDATE 16-1-2022 : BTC-SUSD pair has been removed too. Now we can trade with BTC-UST instead.
On another note, I would like to mention that not everyone is trading with USDT as base coin. Some people prefer to trade BTC vs Altcoins. I just gave my personal opinion but it’s just that, an opinion, other people prefer to trade with other pairs, so it be
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Let’s talk a bit about some things we discussed about and some ideas for improving the strategy.
1- Fix “mainstream effect“: Some people thinks it exists and some others don’t. The truth is that we have found some interesting coincidences. Those who think “mainstream effect” exists say that hundreds of bots running the same strategy and buying and selling at the same points could make a huge pressure.
As you can see, when the price was about to reach to “profit zone” it was stopped. It could be just a coincidence, couldn’t it? Yes, it could, but take a look at this:
This time it was stopped up to 3 times, and it wasn’t able to pass through break even line. Do you still think it’s a coincidence? Maybe, but doing some simple maths, and supposing the average TL is 100 and the bot DCAed 5 times, there would be hundreds of bots selling 600$ at the same point, or at least in a very small price range. Could some hundreds of thousands of dollars act like some kind of resistance? We can’t be 100% sure but considering the reports we got experiencing this exact effect, I think it’s definitely worth to give it a try.
What we plan to do is to assign slighly heavier TL to deeper DCA levels. This should make the average bought price cheaper, and it should help to sell with profit faster.
2- Adjust Trailme range: Other idea we discussed about is to adjust Trailme range depending on the DCA level we are running. What we are trying to do here is to slow down DCA, and specially in deep levels, try to wait for a lower price instead of buying too fast.
3- Avoid buying while price is going down: We are doing some tests with different indicators to try to avoid buying while the price is dropping. In the following pic you can see bot is doing a good job with the trades that are placed inside yellow rectangle, but it would be nice if we could improve the trades made inside blue rentangle.
This is easy to say but not that easy to do, I mean, trying to slow down trades during a drop, could also affect the reactivity that worked fine in yellow rectangle. We will keep doing tests and we will try to get the best balance possible.
There are more things we are working on, and we will keep discussing them. In fact we plan to test 4 different variants with different features and see which one performs better.
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Ok guys, we have new versions ready. At this moment we have 3 versions with 2 variants each one ready to rock & roll.
– Mutation B, aka “The Shield”. The most conservative one. It’s not specially conservative, it’s just more conservative than the other ones. We have Mutation B1 and Mutation B2.
– Mutation C, aka “Frank T”. Same as others it has 2 variants: Mutation C1 and Mutation C2.
– Mutation D, aka “Assassins Grid”. This is the most aggressive one but I still like it a lot. It’s meant to get rid of the bags fast and to use a lower DCA number than others. It has 2 variants: Mutation D1 and Mutation D2.
On the other hand, we have created a Trading Limit Calculator so you just need to fill the red fields, that is, put the Trading Limit Multiplier (TL Multiplier field) of your strategy, put the total amount you are going to use in “Your funds” field and set the number of pairs you what to run. Now you will see in the right column, the green one, the Trading Limit you can use for being able to DCAing X times.
* Fund Req: Funds required for each pair to complete DCA X supposing your Trading Limit (TL) = 100
* TL Calculation: Your total funds / TL Calculation number = Your Trading Limit (TL) for running 1 pair
* Your TL: States the Trading Limit you have to use depending on DCA number after set “Your funds” and “Pairs”
– Example: You have 5000 USDT and you want to run “Mutation D” with DCA 10 and 1 pair. Your TL = 5000 / 56,46
– Example 2: You have 6000 USDT and your want to run “Mutation D” with DCA 8 and 5 pairs. Your TL = 6000 / 32,05 / 5
IMPORTANT: Those who are in the group can contact @JavierAlv via Telegram to get access to the new informative channel to get the most important news and to get access to TL calculator and to the new versions.
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Ok, phase 2 has started. The informative channel is ready. If you are a member of the group and you are still not added to the group, please contact me: @AitorRuiz or Javier: @JavierAlv via Telegram. You will find there important information about the project and some details that may help you to choose the variant you want to test / run in the case you haven’t picked one of the “last generation” variants yet.
On another note, we have made some changes to Trading Limit Calculator. Now it’s much easier to use. And apart from stating the Trading Limit (the green column) you need to use to be able to reach to any DCA number considering the Funds you have, it also states the Required Funds you need to be able to DCAing any number of times. In order to get the Required Funds, we just need to fill in red fields: Your starting Trading Limit, the Trading Limit Multiplier your variant uses, and the Number of Pairs you want to run.
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Hi Fellow SG DCA Mutation testers. I have had D2 running for a couple of days and averaging 60 trades per day and 1.8% profit. Although I cant get Binance P&L to give me a reading, it says no data or the Gunbot P&L, also no data? I am only using $25 limit per first trade (D2 DCA’s) and have had it running on two pairs. USDT-BTC and USDT-ETH. Unsure what my problem is as yet but if I go off total amount in the account each day at the same time I get 1.8% profit so far.
Here are a few screen shots of the trades, unsure if the pics will work as I am not sure how to attach them.
Thank you for your post Mickhowlett
I cant get Binance P&L to give me a reading, it says no data
Binance PNL is shown with delay. For example, Monday PNL starts to appear at 4:00 AM (CET time) Tuesday aprox.
Gunbot P&L, also no data
The version we are running right now, v21.6.2 has an issue with PNL reports. I’m going to update today to v21.7.7 because I have good feedbacks about it and it has PNL fixed, and once I confirm it, I will let you all know in the case you want to update to v21.7.7.
Here are a few screen shots of the trades, unsure if the pics will work as I am not sure how to attach them.
I have just created this quick tutorial on how to attach pics to a post:
https://gunbot.shop/forum/topic/how-to-upload-pics-for-sharing-reports-and-results/
Two more things:
1- Please don’t post especific settings of the variants, as this is a public forum and it’s a very good tool to share our results and keep a record, but the idea is to keep our discussion about especific settings and improvements in our private group.
2- If you want to report your results, it would be nice to create an especific post for it, like I did with this one:
https://gunbot.shop/forum/topic/aitor-sg-mutation-x-results/
In your case it would be something like “Mickhowlett SG Mutation D2 results”
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Quick update: We are starting to test v3 variants with big improvements compared to v2. Things are going good and the strategy successfully handled 40-50% drops in some cases. I will start posting results for SG Mutation C6, the one I’m testing now
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