SUPERALGOS ALPHA: OPEN-SOURCE CRYPTO TRADING BOTS

Advanced Backtesting, Multi-Strategy Live-Trading and Usability Improvements

Superalgos improves on functionality, features and overall reliability.

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

The latest coding sprint by Luis Fernando Molina went on to solve many of the most hard-pressing requirements by the first few early-adopters of the Superalgos Desktop App.

In this post we will cover the main changes and new features, and assist you in transitioning to the new version of the app.

In Brief

• The app is now ready to run multiple backtesting, paper-trading, forward-testing, and live-trading sessions, all at the same time.
• Basic keyboard navigation is now available both on the Charts and the Designer.
• Users may set shortcuts to shift from and to different elements in the Designer.
• Users may now trade live with multiple strategies from within the same instance of the app, and the same machine.
• Improved overall stability, with all known bugs to date removed.
• Support for multiple exchange accounts and API keys.
• Under-the-hood improvements at the infrastructure level preparing the foundations for adding more markets, more indicators and — eventually — more exchanges. We are not there yet, but we certainly are a few steps closer.

For New Users

If you still haven’t got your hands on the Superalgos Desktop App, feel free to visit the app’s page at the website to get up and running with the most versatile trading automation system out there.

It’s free, now and forever.

It’s open-source; no one will take it away or gate the access.

It’s trustless. Everything runs in your machine. No need to trust third parties with funds, API keys or strategies.

What‘s New

Advanced Strategy-Testing Features

Strategy-tuning and optimizing used to be a linear endeavor in which you would come up with an idea, test it, analyze the results, and start over with a new idea, repeating the process as many times as required.

Now you may explore multiple ideas at the same time, run multiple backtests and compare the results directly over the charts.

Before, every time you ran a backtest the app would overwrite the results of the previous run.

Now, each backtesting session stores its own data set, which can be accessed at will, and may be kept for as long as it is useful.

You are now able to set up and keep as many backtesting sessions as you need.

This also means you can segment your backtests on different time ranges — as many as you wish. This is very useful to manage the data set in ways that contribute to preventing data mining or overfitting.

The same ability to handle multiple sessions is available for paper-trading sessions.

Learn more about the new strategy-testing features in the Testing and Simulations section of the documentation.

New Forward Testing Feature

The app is now able to launch forward-testing sessions, that is, live-trading sessions with a fraction of your capital. Forward testing is usually the last stage of strategy-testing before going live.

Unlike with paper-trading, while forward-testing the app places orders at the exchange. This serves the purpose of validating assumptions in terms of expected slippage, as well as certain aspects of order execution.

Learn more in the Forward Testing and Live Trading section of the documentation.

Extended Live-Trading Features

On the previous version of the app, live-trading implied devoting the entire app to that particular operation.

With today’s setup you may launch a live-trading session and keep using the app at will.

This means you may continue to improve your strategies, make changes at any level of your definition or trading system, and launch backtesting, paper-trading and forward-testing sessions without affecting your live session.

You may also have multiple live trading sessions and set up multiple API keys. This allows trading with multiple strategies as well as trading with multiple accounts and sub-accounts at the exchange, all from within the same instance of the app and from within the same machine.

Learn more in the Forward Testing and Live Trading section of the documentation.

Improved Usability

As part of a continuous effort to improve usability, we have added support for keyboard navigation, both while on the Charts as well as on the Designer.

When on the Charts, use:

1. Shift + ← to pan to the left.
2. Shift + → to pan to the right.
3. Shift + ↑ to pan upwards.
4. Shift + ↓ to pan downwards.

When on the Designer, use:

1. Ctrl + ← to pan to the left.
2. Ctrl + → to pan to the right.
3. Ctrl + ↑ to pan upwards.
4. Ctrl + ↓ to pan downwards.

For Mac systems, replace Ctrl with Command.

You may also set up shortcuts to navigate from one Designer element to the other. This is very useful, for instance, when you are polishing your take profit phases and running backtests to check the result, so that you can jump from the Manage stage of your strategy to the backtesting session with a simple key combination.

Learn how to set up your shortcuts in the Element Shortcuts section of the documentation.

Transitioning to V.0.0.3

The new version of the app requires to update old workspaces so that they are compatible with the new low-level infrastructure.

All the templates in the Quick-Start-Examples folder of the new release have been updated to the new version and are ready to use, including the open-source strategies recently released: Bull run rider and Weak-hands buster.

If you haven’t yet worked on your own strategies or modified existing strategies, then you are free to update to the new version by following the instructions in the Upgrading Your Existing Installation section of the documentation.

You may also want to take a look at the Running the App and Managing Processes sections of the documentation to get familiar with the nuances concerning the app’s operation introduced in this new version.

Updating Legacy Workspaces

When you open the new version of the app it will load — as usual — the workspace stored at the browser.

Your old workspaces will not load the Superalgos Network element which should be connected to the top level of the hierarchy, that is, your definition.

The reason is that the structure of the infrastructure handling process has changed.

To update your workspace, you will need to import one of the following files that you will find in the Quick-Start-Examples folder of the release, and connect it to your definition:

• Share — Network — Superalgos — BTC — SDA v.0.0.3.json
• Share — Network — Superalgos — USDT — SDA v.0.0.3.json

Notice that the only difference between the two files is that one of them is set up for USDT-based strategies, such as the Bull run rider, and the other one is set up for BTC-based strategies like the Weak-hands buster.

If you haven’t modified the original strategies or created your own, then you are much better off importing one of the updated workspaces instead.

For instructions on how to import a file into the Designer, please read the Using an Existing Strategy section of the documentation.

You may find instructions on Detachment and Attachment of Elements in the documentation as well.

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