Sparkster’s Algo Backtesting Progress Update — Feb 2020
ETH/USD Buy Signal Triggered at $128… Sign up for early access.
Successful crypto traders have a trick…
A trick that gives them a clear advantage over the majority of the market.
While most hopeful cryptocurrency profiteers are guessing what direction prices will go based on twitter hype and news announcements, those successful traders are consistently collecting big profits.
In a nutshell, the trick used by successful crypto traders is quite simple:
Use a much more sophisticated trading strategy than the majority.
While most people are fiddling around with charts, trying to make sense of sudden price spikes and dips, emotionally buying and selling based more on ‘hope’ than strategy, the successful trader filters out the noise by using multi-layered indicator strategies to validate price momentum.
We think that’s quite unfair. We also appreciate how much detail is involved with managing a sophisticated trading strategy to beat the market.
Imagine a tool that lets you test trading strategies automatically — before using any money.
Imagine a community of traders who share their fully tested strategies for others to benefit from.
That is the vision for our Sparkster Algo Signals Marketplace — and we’ve just reached another exciting milestone. So we’re keen to share a new progress update.
We’ll cover our alpha tester program, the launch of our public beta, and a technical update. But first…
Results From Strategies thus far
Here are a handful of screenshots taken from inside the platform showing buy and sell signals produced by Public strategies shared by alpha testers at different time-frames.
In this first screenshot showing a 30-minute time-frame, we see two buy signals since early January (small green arrows pointing up), with the first closing out the trade on January 24 at 4.30am for a 20.23% gain. This strategy generated a buy signal at $128.59, and a sell signal at $156.34. The strategy opened another trade just two days later on January 26 at $167.87 and so far it’s up 7.5% with the trade still open for more gains at the time of this writing.
Savvy traders know that not all trades will be successful. They expect to see gains as well as losses. The goal is to minimize losing trades and ‘let the winners run’ which means maximizing the profit from winning trades when the trend is strong.
In the next screenshot we can see how important sell signals can be to protect the trader from significant losses by closing trades when the strategy detects a near-term downtrend.
This example points out three sell signals right before significant price declines, therefore saving the trader from big losses.
The platform allows strategies to be tested on different popular time-frames including 1 Day, 4 hour, 2 hour, 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Some eager traders attempt to use time-frames as low as 5-minutes. We avoid low time-frames in the platform at this time.
Here is a good example of strong buy signals on the 4-hour time-frame.
And here we can see the moment the sell signal appeared for that same strategy, closing a very successful trade with a profit of ~$17 per ETH traded.
Using the platform, community members can optimize strategies by testing different sets of technical indicators to minimize losing trades, and maximize the winners.
Here on the 1-day time-frame, a protective sell signal was triggered back on 15th November, then a new buy signal triggered on 30 December at $133 and we’re still in the trade at the beginning of February at $188. A $55 gain per ETH so far, a 40% increase.
In our final example we see an 11,448% gain during the long bull run of 2017 for ETH using a strategy based on Ichimoku cloud and moving averages.
Strategy Metrics are now available on the platform in a popup sidebar on the left of the page. Here we can see this strategy produced just 4 trades, 3 were winners and 1 was a loss. This gives a win rate of 75% with an expected return on investment per trade of $219.92. Total gains of the strategy were $61,270 and the losing trade was just $69.65.
Below the chart on every strategy test page is a detailed history of all trades executed by the strategy. Here we can see the trades for the above Ichimoku strategy starting at a balance of $10,000 and ending at $71,201.33.
Team Sparkster is looking forward to our community using the tool during the next big cryptocurrency bull run.
How Are Signals Used By Traders?
Once a strategy is well optimized, the trader can either manually place those trades on an exchange, or receive signals to another platform for automatic execution.
We have chosen Telegram as the first platform for integration and that feature is now available to alpha testers.
Traders can add their Telegram username to receive buy and sell signals for instant notification.
Sell Signals are 100% FREE
Giving sell signals away without charge allows traders to experience the performance of the platform before they decide to pay for anything.
Buy Signals Earn Royalties
Buy signals are priced by the strategy creator, earning them ongoing royalty commissions for paid subscribers.
Traders receiving their signals in real-time to Telegram can then log on to their exchange account to manage trades.
The signals subscription and Telegram update gets us closer to launching a public beta.
Product Roadmap Highlights
The current product roadmap includes 132 entities being planned and implemented by Team Sparkster over the coming weeks and months.
This includes various marketing initiatives along with recent technical enhancements, a small segment of which is shown here:
See the Technical Update further down this article for details.
Now that load-time and scalability have been very significantly optimized (reducing time to test strategies from around 30 seconds down to under 1 second) we can now proceed to the next very significant phase of product development: More currencies!
More Currencies Coming Soon!
Besides a tremendous amount of smaller tweaks and adjustments throughout the code base of the platform, the one big milestone the team and alpha tester community are looking forward to is simply adding more cryptocurrency pairs.
It may seem like a simple change but the amount of software development and database management optimization required is nothing short of Enterprise-class. See the Technical Update below from our engineering team working on the Algo Platform.
The good news is that as soon as one additional cryptocurrency pair is made possible on the platform, it will actually be very fast work to add each additional pair.
Currently we have only ETHUSD. Next will be BTCUSD. Once that is done we will open up requests to our alpha tester community and add pairs based on popular request.
If you would like to join our alpha tester group, register your interest at http://bit.ly/alpha-testers and we will notify you when the next cohort begins.
To conclude, here is the technical update…
Technical Update
It is critical for number-crunching applications like our strategy testing tool to be both efficient in speed and efficient in memory. For this reason, since our last update we have continued the optimization process of the application.
The effect of this optimization is that test strategies which are similar to existing strategies will execute more quickly. If a strategy is drastically different from a strategy that has already been tested or that is live, the strategy will still take a little bit of time to initially compute.
Reduced Memory Footprint
We also decreased the demand on IO and eliminated much of the large dataflow between different processes in the application, dramatically decreasing the memory footprint of the tool. For the end-user, this means that the application will be much more responsive than it has been in the past.
SPRK Integration
Our application now fully integrates with Ethereum and uses SPRK tokens to act as an account balance. Right now, we are pointing to the Ropsten Testnet, but we will switch over to the main Ethereum network soon. Users can deposit and withdraw SPRK tokens from the platform’s contract directly from within the platform, using MetaMask.
Strategy Subscriptions
We have also introduced the ability to subscribe to Buy and Sell signals on a strategy. Alongside our application, we are running a Telegram bot. The bot and application communicate when a new signal is generated on a strategy.
Subscribed users will receive a notification in their activity logs when a new strategy to which they are subscribed generates a new signal. If the user has also set up a Telegram username, the bot will send the buy or sell signal to the Telegram channel they indicate.
Accessibility Improvements
Aside from these changes, we have introduced many accessibility fixes to the application. We have marked up different sections on the “View Strategy” page using landmarks, allowing assistive technology users to jump around the page quickly.
We also employ heavy use of ARIA, which is a web accessibility standard through which we can explicitly notify assistive technology of the state of controls (such as when we expand or collapse a menu).
Smaller accessibility improvements include better modal boxes, and modal forms (such as the Strategy Configurator on the View page) automatically gaining focus when opened.
Early Access Alpha Tester Invite
We look forward to your participation in our early access alpha tester program. To gain access, simply register your interest here: http://bit.ly/alpha-testers.
Team Sparkster
