I always considered finance and accounting as the most boring things you can do with a computer. And while you can earn big bucks, working for a Swiss bank, I have always preferred topics with a more physical background.<\/p>\n
But BitCoin got me interested in how some aspects of the established financial systems work. Looking at the bitcoin price fluctuations, I long suspected that it should be possible to write a trading agent to exploit the volatility. It could follow some fix pre-programmed rules, or find the rules by itself using machine learning. All the data it would need to work on, is easily available.<\/p>\n
Last summer started btcrobot<\/a>, a service that promised just that. They have a subscription model, and I’m sure, if it doesn’t work out, they still gain and the users loose. I didn’t really want to pay hundreds of dollars just to find out if it works. And to be honest, the whole site smelled like a scam.<\/p>\n So I completed the Coursera class “Computational Investing 1<\/a>“. It was more about portfolio management and algorithmic trading of stocks. But a lot of the material can be applied to currency trading and in special to bitcoin as well. In the homeworks we built a small trading agent and portfolio optimizer. The main metric we used was the Bollinger Bands<\/a> technical indicator.<\/p>\n So I started implementing a bitcoin trading agent that would use bollinger bands. I didn’t want to start completely from scratch, so I skimmed through github and sourceforge for a starting point. I selected funny-bot, and started extending<\/a> it. But soon, my interest switched to other projects. Remember, finance is not my primary interest. In the last months I had an eye on the exchange rates, trying to see how such an agent might perform. And I think it would be very difficult to tune, at least without experience in that field.<\/p>\n Last week I found out again that I suck at trading. The bitcoin price started rising like cracy. I thought if it goes up so fast, it must come down again. In a rush, I sold some of my bitcoins. I wanted to buy again after the price would crash. But the price kept rising, and I would have gotten a lot more if I sold them just two days later. Apparently I was not alone with my false prediction.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I always considered finance and accounting as the most boring things you can do with a computer. And while you can earn big bucks, working for a Swiss bank, I have always preferred topics with a more physical background. But BitCoin got me interested in how some aspects of the established financial systems work. Looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,6,7,1],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-1148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bitcoin","category-education","category-projects","category-software","category-uncategorized","tag-bitcoin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ulrichard.ch\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}