My Flash Crash Experience: Liquidated, Reopened, and the Bot's Record Day
My current situation.
I’d been holding a futures position for a long time, planning to close it when Kasplex smart contracts roll out. You can read the latest plans here.
To be honest, I was watching a family movie in the evening when I decided to check my phone and saw a mind-boggling number of alerts from the bot showing Kaspa prices around 0.053. My first reaction was just to see what was going on and why. I only remembered my futures position about 10 minutes later. When I did, I saw it had been liquidated - and at a price that didn’t even exist on spot. I saw a candle on futures down to 0.009, realized it was a flash crash (thanks, experience), and also noticed a massive gap between futures and spot. While futures were trading around ~0.035–0.037, spot was about 0.05. That’s a chasm that should close fairly quickly.
Understanding what drove the futures price - and that such prints were the result of panic on Trump’s post, which he could reverse 180 degrees in a couple of days (as he’s done multiple times), I jumped back in with higher (x3) leverage, at a lower price than my liquidation (0.03896) and an even lower new liquidation level (0.02612 now). If we don’t see a repeat of that kind of move, it should be possible to make back the loss and even more. Risks: there’s a non-zero chance of repeat air-pockets, especially since most of the liquidity has already been wiped out, making it much easier to push the price down now.
Overall, I got lucky. If I hadn’t decided to check my phone, I would’ve been left with a liquidated position and zero chance to recover anything. This way - I might even end up making more. Time will tell.
My takeaways from all this: I need to tweak my own rules by shortening the expected duration of a trade. If the target is hit, don’t wait for “overperformance.” Take your profit and be satisfied. With this trade I dragged it out too long, waiting for the market to let me go. Didn’t work out.
MY BOT @KAS_USDT_BOT
It performed like a machine gun. Just so you understand: today (still not over) I’ve already done 1,063 Kaspa trades and 142 Bitcoin trades. That’s more than all of September or August!! And it’s an absolute all-time record by a wide margin for my entire time using the bot and tracking Kaspa. That long-awaited volatility is here. Now we just need higher levels. There’s no way to replicate this manually. Some people complained they couldn’t log into exchanges, including Binance; the bot had no issues.
@KAS_DEMO_BOT
Many noticed it shows old prices and seems to lag the market. That’s true, but not critical, because it records absolutely all market prices and keeps them in memory, so it won’t miss anything - just be patient. It will process everything and catch up. The issue is that simulating virtual trades consumes a fair amount of server resources, and that server is weaker than the main bot’s. On top of that, the user count is much higher. Plus today is an big anomaly in terms of quote volume. As soon as volatility calms down, I’ll move it to a more powerful server and optimize the code. For now, just observe; I think by tonight it’ll catch up to real-time and process the entire queue of quotes.
To reiterate, the main bot doesn’t have these problems - different code, more powerful server, and fewer users.
Originally posted in Telegram channel.
