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Comment by luxpir

I've been creating trading bots for a while now and would have preferred if you targeted your communication at someone like me rather than at people new to the market. It would have seemed more honest. As it stands you don't address any of the potential questions I might have had, such as:

Why the focus on crypto when it's illiquid, unregulated (people lose money from folding brokers regularly), hard to secure etc. vs forex which is highly liquid (very little gapping/get the price you want, when you want), very well regulated with many highly professional international brokers offering APIs you could work with right now. It feels disingenuous to target crypto only, even if initially, like you're cashing in on the (currently subsided) wave. I've talked to 100s of traders too and I don't recognise the problems you've raised.

Why mention 1000s of currency pairs when... there aren't 1000s? In forex there are dozens, in crypto - well OK any amount a broker puts together, but understand that the more rare or minor the pair, the less liquid and harder to trade by algo. And you don't want to algo trade correlated pairs, that's just taking more risk unintentionally. So in practice you don't want to be trading 1000s, that's unrealistic and misleading.

Where's your education section - this really isn't as easy as you make out, and you offering MA Cross as a sample shows how much this is targeted at the beginner level. Which is where people lose money. You need to be the resource for algo trading education. Better than the ones offered elsewhere.

Saying you're democratising something that is pretty much already democratised is not a great start, IMO. Algo trading in forex is not an immature market. Look at the Metatrader website or Forex Forums and you'll find dozens of free bots to get you started with the code and backtesting.

Going forward I'd like to see you educate your users better, talk more about the realities of algo trading and offer more up front.

You've probably built something really cool, but I can't get past these initial red flags. You should show us the non-coding interface and talk up that side. I've used similar in the past and it can be a quick way to build an algo, but you've got to have guidance to make anything profitable - I've been through 1000s of ideas but the markets can offer multiples of those back in edge cases where they fail. You should list your indicators, talk about what risk management and order management features you've come up with, show traders how you've solved many of the tricky problems.

There's huge room for a profitable business in this field, particularly in creating a platform that can displace MT4 with a multi-core, secure backtesting environment using Python or similar. Maybe even incorporating ML in a non-code fashion. But the non-code parts would be the icing on the cake. Most algo devs have to get their hands dirty at some point.

Otherwise I'm just worried you're going to mislead a lot of people.

That's my 2 cents, hope it helps with perspective for you or anyone coming after you in this space.

parent luxpir 7 years ago

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