If you want Gekko to provide automated trading advice you need to configure this in Gekko. Note that this is a different plugin than the "trader" which is a responsible for actually creating orders based on this advice. (So if you want automated trading you need both this advice as well as the auto trader).
This plugin automatically creates orders based on the advice from the "Trading Advisor" from the market Gekko is watching. This turns Gekko into an automated trading bot.
Before Gekko can automatically trade you need to create API keys so that Gekko has the rights to create orders on your behalf, the rights Gekko needs are (naming differs per exchange): get info, get balance/portfolio, get open orders, get fee, buy, sell and cancel order. For all exchanges you need the API key and the API secret, for both Bitstamp and CEX.io you also need your username (which is a number at Bitstamp).
Configure it like this:
config.trader = {
enabled: true,
key: 'your-api-key',
secret: 'your-api-secret',
username: 'your-username' // your username, only fill in when using bitstamp or cexio
}
- enabled indicates whether this is on or off.
- key is your API key.
- secret is your API secret.
- username is the username (only required for CEX.io and Bitstamp).
### Advice logger
The advice logger is a small plugin that logs new advice calculated by Gekko as soon as there is any. Go to the config and configure it like this:
config.adviceLogger = {
enabled: true
}
- enabled indicates whether this is on or off.
The advice logged advice will look something like this in the terminal:
2014-01-15 14:31:44 (INFO): We have new trading advice!
2014-01-15 14:31:44 (INFO): Position to take: long
2014-01-15 14:31:44 (INFO): Market price: 5.96
2014-01-15 14:31:44 (INFO): Based on market time: 2014-01-15 14:31:01
The paper trader listens to Gekko's advice and on a sell it will swap all (simulated) currency into (simulated) assets at the current price. On a buy it will be the other way around.
- slippage is the costs in (in %) associated with not being able to buy / sell at market price.*
*If you are trading a lot and you are buying 100% currency you might not get it all at market price and you have to walk the book in order to take that position. Also note that Gekko uses the candle close price and is unaware of the top asks bids, also take this into account. It is important that you set this number correctly or the resulted calculated profit be very wrong. Read more information [here](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/slippage.asp). Take these into consideration when setting a slippage:
- How much spread is there normally on this market?
- sendMailOnStart will email you right away after Gekko started, you can also use this if you are automatically restarting Gekko to see crash behaviour.
- Email is your email address from which Gekko will send emails (to the same address).
- password is the email password: Gekko needs to login to your account to send emails to you:
> You don't have to set your password here, if you leave it blank we will ask it
> when Gekko's starts.
>
> NOTE: Gekko is an open source project < https://github.com/askmike/gekko >,
> make sure you looked at the code or trust the maintainer of this bot when you
> fill in your email and password.
>
> WARNING: If you have NOT downloaded Gekko from the github page above we CANNOT
- emitUpdates tells Gekko that whenever there is a new advice it should broadcast this in the room.
- roomId is the ID of the Campfire room the bot will connect to.
- apiKey is the API key for the Campfire user Gekko will connect using.
- account is the subdomain for the account that the room belongs to.
### Redis beacon
This is an advanced plugin only for programmers! If you are interested in this read more [here](https://github.com/askmike/gekko/blob/stable/docs/internals/plugins.md#redis-beacon).
