thebotfarm.com

Bitter experience has long taught me to use stop losses to limit my overall exposure for a given trade or gamble.  In most forex Expert Advisors the stop loss gets set automatically when the trade is entered.  Casino and horseracing bots have to stop when they run out of whatever small bankroll I have given them to use.  The main poker room I use has a seductive setting for automatic rebuys and top-ups which can drain your account dry overnight if your bot goes a little berserk.  Normally I don’t maintain enough in the account for this to be a major worry

Call it greed or optimism, but at the other end of the equation I have always resisted putting a profit target into my systems.  If asked what my target gain is I would be tempted to say “to the moon and back”.   At the back of my mind I always have the old trading adage “cut your losses, but let your profits run”.  The trailing stop loss is intuitively the most appealing approach to me, where the upside is unlimited, but only a limited amount of backsliding will be tolerated before the trade or session is terminated.  The problem with this is that it can cause you to lose out on large gains if the session would have recovered to above the exit point. 

Something like this consideration inspired the programmer of the Amoeba bot to implement a ”collar” system, where the bot would sit out and carry on trading in shadow mode only when a certain slipback from the local maximum profit was suffered, but would start trading live again when the session recovered.  The collared progression is seen to good effect in this graph, where the yellow line represents the actual profit curve achieved on the basis of the raw results, shown in white.   Had these results been consistently repeatable, of course, I would be writing this blog from a far warmer place.

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Lent is traditionally a time of sackcloth and ashes, and believe me I have made enough mistakes in the past few weeks to warrant a lengthy bout of self-flagellation.  But lets stick to the facts and then move on.  First, most of my time and energy, not to mention money, has been spent (squandered, wasted) on trying to get a handle on Rush poker, whether manually or by botting.  My consolidated results are enough to make a grown man cry, so I will just soften the blow first by mentioning that the losses shown here are partially offset by $300 of rakeback earned during these sessions.

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I’m past the point of my life where I regularly wake up clutching a head still reeling from the excesses of the night before.  But I’m feeling similar disorientation this Monday morning after my crash (and burn) introduction to manual play in Rush Poker.  It should be a positive story, if viewed from 30,000 feet.  Having tried and failed to turn the Shanky bot into an ATM on the micro-limit Rush Poker tables, I decided to have a try manually, bought in with $32 and ended up an hour later with $236 in the account.   Defying my normal practice of throwing it all away again I actually withdrew $136 of that back to safety before burning through the remaining $100 at the highest limit tables.  What I find troubling is that a) in no time at all I got hooked on the sheer pace and excitement of the game and b) my manual poker instincts are no better than they ever were.  I’m still too much of an optimist and have a serious leak in my game which accounted for most of the $100 bust-out – that is that I call all-in raises with the second-best hand – over and over and over again.

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Following on from my last post, here are affiliate and other links to all of my current recommendations.

WinPro and other Easy-EA Expert Advisors

the GreyHorseBot (for dogs, horses, football, snooker, tennis etc)

Amoeba – Download it for free from here (but no support, guarantees or updates!)

UltraXTrader – My second fave Exchange Games bot with great support from the Sporting Bots team

X -Feeder – the grand-daddy in terms of functionality, if you can get to grips with programming it

Holdem Bot – the only poker bot worth considering, but needs a little work to get the best out of it

Super-Roulette – the Rolls Royce of the roulette bots, with new features being added weekly

Roulette Assault – robust performance and lightning speed at a great price

Roulette Bot Pro – great value purchase options and wide variety of casinos supported

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From time to time it’s a good idea to raise our eyes from the piece of rock we are knocking into shape and try to remember the vision of the cathedral that we are meant to be building.  In that spirit I would like to refresh my own memory and that of my readers as to where we are going with all of this.  To forget the nitty gritty detail of whether I’ll be using Virtuozzo or Hyper-V, RDP or VNC and remember why I’m in this game to start with – namely to make money in an automated and unattended fashion.

So – what will be the broad outlines of the botfarm once it is fully constructed?  Now that the mists have cleared a little in front of my eyes, I envisage the following main divisions.

The Finance Field – This is where the cash cows of the forex market will graze, with WinPro from Easy-EA.com as the leader of the herd (and others from the same family not far behind).  There is space in the field for other species, such as stock and index traders, but no firm plans at the moment as to when those spaces might be filled.

The Gallops – Here we will find the fleet-footed Grey Horse Bots, ready to pounce at any moment on the gains to be had from the horses, dogs and footballers parading their stuff in the Betfair arena.

The Duck Pond – Where the Amoeba bot lurks, garnering pennies at a glacial pace from the Betfair exchange games.

The Poker Barn – Avert your eyes from factory farming at its most brutal, where the Shanky holdem bot, under the control of sit n go starters and table hoppers, tries to grind out a long-term positive expected value under the harsh glare of the poker-room searchlights, with the fear that at any time the whole operation could be raided and shut down.

The Sty – The biggest investment on the whole farm, in terms of market price and feedstuff, the roulette bots are the spoilt porkers of the botfarm.  But the day is surely coming when the farmer cashes in big time on these guys – starting with Super-Roulette, who is getting fat enough to dwarf his stymates.

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Happy New Year all.  Still up to my neck in bot projects, but in the unusual situation of being heavily reliant on other people to make progress, so am having to show unaccustomed levels of patience.  A recent recruit to the Amoeba userbase, after it was released as freeware, informs me that he is having great success with a system he is trying out, so I wait with bated breath for further news.  Mr Steve from Tagadab has stepped up to the plate and set his engineers on the problem of using bots under Hyper-V, and Matt from Super-Roulette has helped with trial versions of his bot.  So, rather than let the grass grow under my feet, I have conducted some analysis of the performance of the WinPro bot that I have been using since October using the Trade Analyser package also supplied by Easy-EA.com

The first thing that I spotted was that one of the currency pairs I had been using it for (GBPUSD) appeared to have lost money and dented my overall profits.  That was quickly addressed by removing that particular chart from the setup.  Analysing the results on the remaining pairs the results are as summarised below (bear in mind that WinPro implements 3 different strategies per pair, each of which is analysed by use of a separate magic number).

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A little meditation today on the journey of the Botfarm in its search for a perfect location.  Also something of a plea for help from those with more technical nous than me – I know this blog has more readers than it has commentators, so your engagement would be welcomed.  (Warning – dull semi-technical gubbins ahead!)

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