Posts Tagged ‘cex trading’

Some Thoughts About CEX.io Bitcoin Cloud Mining and Exchange Service

14, Feb 2014

cex-io-cloud-mining-and-exchange

We’ve been using the CEX.io services for a while already and have decided to share some of our experience and tips and tricks in order to help you get the best out of the service if you are using it or plan to use it at some point. The idea behind CEX is that you can purchase BTC ASIC hashrate in the cloud, so that the purchased GHS will start mining Bitcoins immediately for you. CEX.io also has an exchange where you actually buy and sell hashrate – GHS for BTC or NMC, and also can trade LTC/BTC and NMC/BTC. The service also includes the Ghash.io BTC mining pool where your cloud hashrate is mining for you, and if yuo have physical Bitcoin miners you can also point them to that pool to mine coins for you – the pool fee is 0% and currently this is the largest of the BTC mining pools.

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The fact that you don’t actually buy GHS at a fixed price, but instead you can purchase hashrate at the current market price is both a good and a bad thing. Due to the fact that there is an exchange available you need to trade BTC or NMC for GHS in order to get some hasrate to mine for you, so you can expect the price you will have to pay for 1 GHS to be 2-3 times higher than what you would pay for a physical Bitcoin ASIC. The good thing with cloud mining at CEX.io is that you can easily and quickly sell your hashrate at the exchange at any time. The bad thing is that there is a very high chance that in a few days or weeks of time the exchange rate per GHS will most likely be lower than the rate at you purchased. This is happening because of the constantly increasing difficulty of the Bitcoin network, and as a result the rate at which your cloud hashrate is mining coins for you will also drop in time. This makes it not worthwhile to invest in GHS on the long run expecting that you will end up with profit from what you have mined with the purchased hasrate after you sell the gigahashes you purchased on the exchange in a while.

bitcoinwisdom-ghs-btc-cex-io

What you should consider to do if you plan on using CEX.io effectively is to trade GHS on the exchange (there is a 0% fee for trades on that exchange) and while you are trading them the purchased hasrate will generate you some extra profit as it will mine for Bitcoins. This is simply the best and most profitable option that will give you the chance to make some extra profit, though it will require you to have some trading knowledge and experience in order to do the right decisions on the exchange. It is not a wise idea to look for automated trading solution to help you in trading such as the Cryptotrader platform that we’ve reviewed recently unless you really know what you are going to do with it. On the other hand the use of some sort of market indicators such as EMA can help you in making the right decisions at the right time. You can find a good source for technical analysis of the GHS market at Bitcoinwisdom, but be careful with these indicators as well as they can only help you identify the market trends and not guarantee you anything.

– For more information about the CEX.io Bitcoin cloud mining and exchange…

Testing Cryptotrader Automated Cloud Based Trading Platform

11, Feb 2014

cryptotrader-org-homepage

Cryptotrader is a cloud based online algorithmic trading platform for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This service allows traders to backtest and automate their crypto trading strategies via a flexible built-in scripting language based on Coffeescript. Trading strategies can be fully automated by using trading robots running on a scalable VPS cloud service, meaning that you do not have to have a computer on all the time with a trading software running on it. Cryptotrader does support MtGox (BTC/USD and BTC/EUR), Bitstamp (BTC/USD), BTC-E (BTC, LTC, NMC, XPM, PPC) as well as CEX.IO (GHS/BTC, NMC/BTC and LTC/BTC). The service is subscription-based with various levels offering different features and pricing methods. There is a limited backtesting support available for free to registered users. We decided to give the service a try mostly because of the fact that it does support CEX.IO trading and we were interested in checking some automated bot trading strategies. Below you can read our review of the service that we’ve already used for a few days…

cryptotrader-subscription-plans

To be able to really try the service you will need to subscribe for a Basic license that costs $8 USD per month as this will give you access not only to full backtesting access, but also the ability to run a single simulated trading bot. If you want to be able to actually trade with real crypto coins or cash in a supported exchange you will need to go for at least a Basic+ subscription plan tat is priced at $24 USD per month… this is the plan we went for to test the service. The other more expensive plans offer extra features such as more bots and higher trading account equity limits, but if you want to try out the service yourself we would recommend to start with the Basic+ plan as we did and then if you decide to keep using it you can upgrade to a higher plan.

cryptotrader-backtesting-vs-real-trading

The idea behind Cryptotrader is that you can program your own bot with a trading methodology of your own using some readily available tools and a simple to use scripting language. However you do need to be good enough in market technical analysis and have a bit of programming skills in order to program your own bot, so it is not as easy as you may initially think. There are also a lot of users that do share their trading bot code for everyone to try out and optimize, which is the easier way to start using the service, however it is also riskier for you. Most of the trading bots shared are not finished and polished, so by using these you may end up loosing more than earning, furthermore they are not well documented, so that you could easily tweak them for better performance. One of the things that is common for most of the publicly available bots for trading at Cryptotrader use all of the coins and money you have available on the exchange and you should be very careful starting actual trades with these if your account does have large amount of these. Also as you can see from the example on the photo above doing backtesting on a automated trading bot on already available market data can differ a lot compared to actual trading with the same code as there are many factors that influence the results such as large buy/sell orders not filled completely and timing out.

Our testing of various publicly available automated trading bots that show decent profitability during backtesting has shown not so good results with actual trading and so far for already a few days of testing the service we’ve gotten quite used to the code and can further improve and optimize the code publicly available and trading on CEX mostly is still resulting in general minor loss of the starting balance. So we would advice not to go for trading just on the CEX exchange using Cryptotrader and if you are not sure you are going to be able to write your own trading code to better avoid that service as it is not for everyone and most definitely not designed for normal users. We are still going to play with the service until our one month plan is over, but after that we are probably not going to be renewing it and are instead going to try some other alternatives that we still haven’t tested yet. You are of course welcome to try out the service yourself, just be warned and be aware that it is not for everyone and most definitely not for normal users without decent trading experience and programming skills!

– For more information and to try out the Cryptotrader automated trading service yourself…


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