About Slingshot

The alpha version of this bot was called “Baskets”. I took the idea “don’t keep all your eggs in the same basket, and thought about how to trade all coins on the market for one base currency.  This version placed one trade per coin, bought on a 10% daily price fall if there were no open orders, placed a sell order 10% higher, and waited.  This version worked very well but slowly.  Then I made it more “Elastic” and named it that.  It then could place multiple trades per coin forming a grid with sell orders 10% below the last.  By the time I gave the bot the nickname “Slingshot” many settings could be changed by the user, and after seeing great success after a couple months running it I decided to make and share with the world a version that sends me commission when sell orders are placed.  

Overview

Slingshot follows these smart practices:

1. Buy lower / Sell higher, no exceptions
2. Don’t invest all you have all at once
3. Don’t put all eggs in the same basket

Slingshot is a powerful tool to trade many coins at the same time.  This illustration should give an idea about how it trades.  In this example the “Rise” (Profit) % is very small, to make the picture easier to understand.

Choosing quality coins is a good idea, but it is not always necessary.  All we need for Slingshot to work in the long run are coins that will not disappear, not get delisted, and at least have enough trading volume to stay volatile.  Even if a coin loses 90% of its value, the system will eventually earn more coin than the total amount of sell orders unfulfilled.  

Sounds like bullshit / markets are random / how is winning possible?

Think about Time.  There will always be a finite number of sell orders open on any pair from slightly above its highest price point from the time you started slingshot.  But time is infinite, and as long as a coin remains active and volatile (price keeps wiggling up and down), eventually there will be enough sell orders filled below the finite number of non-filled orders.  If the coin ever gets pumped, you’ll reap a huge profit quickly, and if not you can only lose in the long run if the coin gets delisted from trading exchanges Slingshot runs on.

So, Slingshot is like having a grocery store where you buy products (coins) with a percentage of your allocation for that product. You only buy more at a better price, and whatever you buy is put for sale at a higher price.  The sell orders that never fill are a finite amount representing the products that don’t get sold.  

A lot of people leave manual trading for automated trading because their emotions get in the way and they lose money due to panic and hype.  The sad thing is that often they bring their emotions to automated trading anyway, staring at the robot printouts all day, getting nothing done, and learning nothing.  They sometimes panic and decide to “liquidate” all their coins at the worst times.  With Slingshot, the wisest thing to do is run it and walk away.  Only check to make sure the bot is still running.  The latest versions do not freeze, so it is safe to leave them running on a machine without checking every day.

Running Slingshot: User settings

API_KEY API_SECRET	The API keys are needed for any robot to place trades from your account on your behalf.   Be sure to click “New Key” AND “Save Changes” before entering them Never share your Api Secret!!! Doing so could result in hackers stealing all your coins.
Select a Base Market	BTC, USDT, NZDT, LTC or DOGE
restore settings?	If you chose to save settings when you first launched Slingshot, you can restore those settings here. If you change
Trade specific Coins?	You can leave this blank and Slingshot will use the top X high volume markets.  X is chosen later.  If you want to use a custom list of coins (Highly Recommended), then you can enter a coin list in upper case separated by semicolons, for example: DOT;BCH;CHC;ETC;UNO;ZEC
Exclusion List	If you don’t want to trade specific coins and left that input blank, but you do not want certain coins that might show up in the high volume list to be traded, enter them here in a list of the same format: ie: SPANK;RICKS
Total Base Risk	This is the amount you would lose if all coins you are trading lose exactly 95% of their value.  The risk is split evenly across the markets such that every trade risks the same amount of base. Doing it this way means every sell order filled gives the same profit regardless of the price rates of the trades. If you are trading BTC you might enter: 0.1 since the minimum trade size is 0.00050000 you can afford 200 trades total ***NOTE that the actual minimum size is 1 satoshi higher than the stated minimums.  A 0.0005 BTC sized trade won’t go through, but a 0.00050001 trade will go through.
Rise Percent (Profit)	When you buy a coin, it will be put up for sale the Rise% higher than the buy price.  If the input keep, chosen later is greater than 0, then this rise% will internally be pushed higher to make sure you get the same base profit. for example if Rise = 34, then only 3 sell orders filling will make up the loss to a sell order that never fills.
Keep	What percent of coin bought will be kept (not sold)? if this is 5% then 95% of your coin will be put up to a sell order at slightly higher than your chosen rise percent to make sure you still get the rise% profit in base currency, while keeping 5% of the altcoin.
Max Trades Per Coin	This number is used to in calculating risk per trade.  It will help calculate the internal “Fall%”.   The (fall factor)#TradesPerCoin (FallFactor)#Trades per coinFirstBuyPrice = 0.05, which is 5% of the original buy price. At this point you would be “fully invested” in this coin.
# Top high volume markets	If you did not enter a custom list of coins, the bot will sort the coins by highest trading volume and select the top results to trade.  You enter how many.  I believe this is riskier than custom picking well established coins, because new coins often get pumped, dumped and delisted.
Save Settings?	If you want to restore the settings you used last time, not have to enter the api and settings details again, you can say Y here.
Fake Buys?	Y – means there won’t be any trades placed at all, but the intentions of the bot will still be printed N – means real trading

Cycles

Slingshot runs through all the coins checking for buy signals.  This is called a cycle.  The cycle in the latest version is 3 minutes.   If for some reason the bot gets stuck waiting for an api return that never comes or whatever reason a new thread will spawn after 3 minutes of no activity anyway and resume trading. I set this to 3 minutes because when I allowed it to be a user options, users did not listen to me- the lag on the exchange was really bad for a few days, some users set this time far too small and the robot spawned overlapping cycles interfering with its own settings.  The lag is gone now, but the cycle time is fixed at 3 minutes to protect you from future lag problems.  The robot works just fine like this.  The more API calls we send in a small amount of time, the more we bog down the server.  We want fast execution times on our exchanges so developing trading strategies that are courteous to their server is the right thing to do.

What are “Good” Settings?

This is personal.  I’ve been posting my recommended settings, but people do their own thing and still make money.  Random Slingshot settings are a lot safer than random Razer settings, so I just encourage you to test whatever settings you want and please share the results in our chat room.  The chatroom accepts screenshots and file sharing so you can post pictures, or the csv file of your entire trading history.

If you think you are losing and are concerned, please share both your settings and the trade history report from the time you started using the bot.  The Estimated BTC balance in your account dropping doesn’t necessarily mean loss.  It could mean the value of BTC spiked higher than all the coins you are trading, but you are still earning base currency (and many alt-coins if keep > 0).  

Exchanges

Right now Slingshot works only on Cryptopia, but I am making it for Tradesatoshi too. You need to know the minimum trade sizes on these exchanges.  Currently they are:

	BTC	USDT	NZDT/BCH	LTC	DOGE
Cryptopia	0.0005	1	1 NZDT	0.01	500
Tradesatoshi	0.000005	0.000005	0.000005 BCH	0.000005	0.000005

Troubleshooting Errors:

To put it blunt: There aren’t any serious errors.  

All my functions, upon exception, print out “Problem in…(something)”, or “Couldn’t get open orders for…(some coin/base pair).  
What we’ve found almost always comes down to a communication problem with the server

1. You didn’t enter the right API_KEY and SECRET
   1. If you did, you didn’t actually click “Save” after generating them
2. Your internet or the exchange is down

The other main problem is an invalid trade size.

Get Started With Slingshot

1. Need Bitcoin/Litecoin/Etherium/BitcoinCash? Buy some from Coinbase
2. Register a trading account with Cryptopia or Tradesatoshi (smaller minimum trade sizes)
   * the Tradesatoshi version is not ready yet, but soon
3. Send coin from Coinbase to trading account
4. Go to our chatroom and download Slingshot from the #slingshot download channel
5. I’ve added the file here on wordpress too: SlingshotCryptopia