TradingBot’s documentation

Introduction

TradingBot is an autonomous trading system that uses customised strategies to trade in the London Stock Exchange market. This documentation provides an overview of the system, explaining how to create new trading strategies and how to integrate them with TradingBot. Explore the next sections for a detailed documentation of each module too.

TradingBot

Build Status Documentation Status

This is an attempt to create an autonomous market trading script using the IG REST API and any other available data source for market prices.

TradingBot is meant to be a “forever running” process that keeps analysing the markets and taking actions whether the conditions are met. It is halfway from an academic project and a real useful piece of software, I guess I will see how it goes :)

The main goal of this project is to provide the capability to write a custom trading strategy with the minimum effort. TradingBot handle all the boring stuff.

All the credits for the FAIG_iqr strategy goes to GitHub user @tg12 who is the creator of the first script version and gave me a good starting point for this project. Thank you.

Dependencies

  • Python 3.4+

View file requirements.txt for the full list of dependencies.

Install

TradingBot can be controlled by the trading_bot_ctl shell script which provides several commands to perform different actions. After cloning this repo, to install TradingBot simply run:

sudo ./trading_bot_ctl install

The required dependencies will be installed and all necessary files installed in /opt/TradingBot by default. It is recommended to add this path to your PATH environment variable.

The last step is to set file permissions on the installed folders for your user with the following command:

sudo chown -R $USER: $HOME/.TradingBot

Setup

Login to your IG Dashboard

  • Obtain an API KEY from the settings panel

  • If using the demo account, create demo credentials

  • Take note of your spread betting account ID (demo or real)

  • Visit AlphaVantage website: https://www.alphavantage.co

  • Request a free api key

  • Insert these info in a file called .credentials

This must be in json format

{
    "username": "username",
    "password": "password",
    "api_key": "apikey",
    "account_id": "accountId",
    "av_api_key": "apiKey"
}

  • Copy the .credentials file in the data folder

  • Revoke permissions to read the file if you are paranoid .. code-block:: guess

    cd data sudo chmod 600 .credentials

Market source

There are different ways to define which markets to analyse with TradinbgBot. You can select your preferred option in the config.json file with the market_source parameter:

  • Local file

You can create a file epic_ids.txt containg IG epics of the companies you want to monitor. You need to copy this file into the data folder.

  • Watchlist

You can use an IG watchlist, TradingBot will analyse every market added to the selected watchlist

  • API

TradingBot navigates the IG markets dynamically using the available API call to fetch epic ids.

Configuration file

The config.json file is in the config folder and it contains several configurable parameter to personalise how TradingBot work. These are the description of each parameter:

General

  • max_account_usable: The maximum percentage of account funds to use (A safe value is around 50%)

  • time_zone: The timezone to use (i.e. ‘Europe/London)

  • enable_log: Enable the log in a file rather than on stdout

  • log_file: Define the full file path for the log file to use, if enabled. {home} and {timestamp} placeholders are replaced with the user home directory and the timestamp when TradingBot started

  • debug_log: Enable the debug level in the logging

  • credentials_filepath: Filepath for the .credentials file

  • market_source: The source to use to fetch the market ids. Available values are explained in the Setup section below.

  • epic_ids_filepath: The full file path for the local file containing the list of epic ids

  • watchlist_name: The watchlist name to use as market source, if selected

  • active_strategy: The strategy name to use. Must match one of the names in the Strategies section below

IG Interface

  • order_type: The IG order type (MARKET, LIMIT, etc.). Do NOT change it

  • order_size: The size of the spread bets

  • order_expiry: The order expiry (DFB). Do NOT change it

  • order_currency: The currency of the order (For UK shares leave it as GBP)

  • order_force_open: Force to open the orders

  • use_g_stop: Use guaranteed stops. Read IG terms for more info about them.

  • use_demo_account: Trade on the DEMO IG account. If enabled remember to setup the demo account credentials too

  • controlled_risk: Enable the controlled risk stop loss calculation. Enable only if you have a controlled risk account.

  • paper_trading: Enable the paper trading. No real trades will be done on the IG account.

Alpha Vantage

  • enable: Enable the use of AlphaVantage API

  • api_timeout: Timeout in seconds between each API call

Strategies

Settings specific for each strategy

SimpleMACD

  • spin_interval: Override the Strategies value

  • max_spread_perc: Spread percentage to filter markets with high spread

  • limit_perc: Limit percentage to take profit for each trade

  • stop_perc: Stop percentage to stop any loss

Start TradingBot

./trading_bot_ctl start

Close all the open positions

./trading_bot_ctl close_positions

Stop TradingBot

./trading_bot_ctl stop

Test

If you have setup a virtual environment you can run the test by running pytest from the project root folder.

You can run the test from a clean environment with:

./trading_bot_ctl test

You can run the test in Docker containers against different python versions:

./trading_bot_ctl test_docker

Documentation

The Sphinx documentation contains further details about each TradingBot module with source code documentation of each class member. Explanation is provided regarding how to create your own Strategy and how to integrate it with the system.

Read the documentation at:

https://tradingbot.readthedocs.io

You can build it locally with:

./trading_bot_ctl docs

The generated html files will be in doc/_build/html.

Automate

NOTE: TradingBot monitors the market opening hours and suspend the trading when the market is closed. Generally you should NOT need a cron job!

You can set up the crontab job to run and kill TradinBot at specific times. The only configuration required is to edit the crontab file adding the preferred schedule:

crontab -e

As an example this will start TradingBot at 8:00 in the morning and will stop it at 16:35 in the afternoon, every week day (Mon to Fri):

00 08 * * 1-5 /.../TradingBot/trading_bot_ctl start
35 16 * * 1-5 /.../TradingBot/trading_bot_ctl stop

NOTE: Remember to set the correct timezone in your machine!

Docker

You can run TradingBot in a Docker container (https://docs.docker.com/):

./trading_bot_ctl start_docker

The container will be called dkr_trading_bot and the logs will still be stored in the configured folder in the host machine. By default ~/.TradingBot/log.

To stop TradingBot:

./trading_bot_ctl stop_docker

or just kill the container:

docker kill dkr_trading_bot

If you need to start a bash shell into the container

docker exec -it dkr_trading_bot bash

Contributing

Any contribution or suggestion is welcome, please follow the suggested workflow.

Pull Requests

To add a new feature or to resolve a bug, create a feature branch from the develop branch.

Commit your changes and if possible add unit/integration test cases. Eventually push your branch and create a Pull Request against develop.

If you instead find problems or you have ideas and suggestions for future improvements, please open an Issue. Thanks for the support!