Follow Orders Strategy

This strategy places a buy and a sell walls into a specific market. It buys below a base price, and sells above the base price.

It then reacts to orders filled (hence the name), when one order is completely filled, new walls are constructed using the filled order as the new base price.

Configuration Questions

Spread

Percentage difference between buy and sell price. So a spread of 5% means the bot sells at 2.5% above the base price and buys 2.5% below.

Wall Percent

This is the “wall height”: the default amount to buy/sell, expressed as a percentage of the account balance. So for sells, its that percentage of your balance of the ‘quote’ asset, and for buys its that same percentage of your balance of the ‘base’ asset.

The advantage of this method (a change from early versions with ‘fixed’ wall heights) is it makes the bot ‘self-correcting’ if it sells to much of one asset, it will enter small orders for that asset, until the market gives it and opposing trade and it can rebalance itself.

Remember if you are using ‘staggers’ (see below) each order is the same: so you probably need to use quite a small percentage here.

Max

The bot will stop trading if the base price goes above this value, it will shut down until you manually restart it. (i.e. it won’t restart itself if the price drops)

Remember prices are base/quote, so on AUD:BTS, that’s the price of 1 AUD in BTS.

Min

Same in reverse: stop running if prices go below this value.

Start

The initial price, as a percentage of the spread between the highest bid and lowest ask. So “0” means the highest bid, “100” means the lowest ask, 50 means the midpoint between them, and so on.

Important: you need to look at your chosen market carefully and get a sense of its orderbook before setting this, justing setting “50” blind can lead to stupid prices especially in illiquid markets.

Reset

Normally the bot checks if it has previously placed orders in the market and uses those. If true, this option forces the bot to cancel any existing orders when it starts up, and re-calculate the starting price as above.

Staggers

Number of additional (or “staggered”) orders to place. By default this is “1” (so no additional orders). 2 or more means multiple sell and buy orders at different prices.

Stagger Spread

The gap between each staggered order (as a percentage of the base price).

So say the spread is 5%, staggers is “2”, and “stagger spread” is 4%, then there will be 2 buy orders: 2.5% and 6.5% (4% + 2.5%) below the base price, and two sells 2.5% and 6.5% above. The order amounts are all the same (see wall percent option).

Bot problems

Like all liquidity bots, the bot really works best with a “even” market, i.e. where are are counterparties both buying and selling.

With a severe “bear” market, the bot can be stuck being the sole participant that is still buying against a herd of panicked humans frantically selling. It repeatingly buys into the market and so it can run out of one asset quite quickly (although it will have bought it at lower and lower prices).

I don’t have a simple good solution (and happy to hear suggestions from experienced traders)