Freqtrade FAQ¶

Freqtrade common issues¶

The bot does not start¶

Running the bot with freqtrade trade --config config.json does show the output freqtrade: command not found.

This could have the following reasons:

The virtual environment is not active
- run source .env/bin/activate to activate the virtual environment
The installation did not work correctly.
- Please check the Installation documentation.

I have waited 5 minutes, why hasn't the bot made any trades yet?!¶

Depending on the buy strategy, the amount of whitelisted coins, the situation of the market etc, it can take up to hours to find good entry position for a trade. Be patient!

I have made 12 trades already, why is my total profit negative?!¶

I understand your disappointment but unfortunately 12 trades is just not enough to say anything. If you run backtesting, you can see that our current algorithm does leave you on the plus side, but that is after thousands of trades and even there, you will be left with losses on specific coins that you have traded tens if not hundreds of times. We of course constantly aim to improve the bot but it will always be a gamble, which should leave you with modest wins on monthly basis but you can't say much from few trades.

I’d like to change the stake amount. Can I just stop the bot with /stop and then change the config.json and run it again?¶

Not quite. Trades are persisted to a database but the configuration is currently only read when the bot is killed and restarted. /stop more like pauses. You can stop your bot, adjust settings and start it again.

I want to improve the bot with a new strategy¶

That's great. We have a nice backtesting and hyperoptimization setup. See the tutorial here|Testing-new-strategies-with-Hyperopt.

Is there a setting to only SELL the coins being held and not perform anymore BUYS?¶

You can use the /forcesell all command from Telegram.

I'm getting the "RESTRICTED_MARKET" message in the log¶

Currently known to happen for US Bittrex users.

Read the Bittrex section about restricted markets for more information.

I'm getting the "Exchange Bittrex does not support market orders." message and cannot run my strategy¶

As the message says, Bittrex does not support market orders and you have one of the order types set to "market". Probably your strategy was written with other exchanges in mind and sets "market" orders for "stoploss" orders, which is correct and preferable for most of the exchanges supporting market orders (but not for Bittrex).

To fix it for Bittrex, redefine order types in the strategy to use "limit" instead of "market":

    order_types = {
        ...
        'stoploss': 'limit',
        ...
    }

Same fix should be done in the configuration file, if order types are defined in your custom config rather than in the strategy.

How do I search the bot logs for something?¶

By default, the bot writes its log into stderr stream. This is implemented this way so that you can easily separate the bot's diagnostics messages from Backtesting, Edge and Hyperopt results, output from other various Freqtrade utility subcommands, as well as from the output of your custom print()'s you may have inserted into your strategy. So if you need to search the log messages with the grep utility, you need to redirect stderr to stdout and disregard stdout.

In unix shells, this normally can be done as simple as:
```
$ freqtrade --some-options 2>&1 >/dev/null | grep 'something'
```
(note, 2>&1 and >/dev/null should be written in this order)

Bash interpreter also supports so called process substitution syntax, you can grep the log for a string with it as:

$ freqtrade --some-options 2> >(grep 'something') >/dev/null

or

$ freqtrade --some-options 2> >(grep -v 'something' 1>&2)

You can also write the copy of Freqtrade log messages to a file with the --logfile option:
```
$ freqtrade --logfile /path/to/mylogfile.log --some-options
```
and then grep it as:
```
$ cat /path/to/mylogfile.log | grep 'something'
```
or even on the fly, as the bot works and the logfile grows:
```
$ tail -f /path/to/mylogfile.log | grep 'something'
```
from a separate terminal window.

On Windows, the --logfile option is also supported by Freqtrade and you can use the findstr command to search the log for the string of interest:

> type \path\to\mylogfile.log | findstr "something"

Hyperopt module¶

How many epoch do I need to get a good Hyperopt result?¶

Per default Hyperopt called without the -e/--epochs command line option will only run 100 epochs, means 100 evals of your triggers, guards, ... Too few to find a great result (unless if you are very lucky), so you probably have to run it for 10.000 or more. But it will take an eternity to compute.

We recommend you to run it at least 10.000 epochs:

freqtrade hyperopt -e 10000

or if you want intermediate result to see

for i in {1..100}; do freqtrade hyperopt -e 100; done

Why it is so long to run hyperopt?¶

Finding a great Hyperopt results takes time.

If you wonder why it takes a while to find great hyperopt results

This answer was written during the under the release 0.15.1, when we had:

8 triggers
9 guards: let's say we evaluate even 10 values from each
1 stoploss calculation: let's say we want 10 values from that too to be evaluated

The following calculation is still very rough and not very precise but it will give the idea. With only these triggers and guards there is already 8*10^9*10 evaluations. A roughly total of 80 billion evals. Did you run 100 000 evals? Congrats, you've done roughly 1 / 100 000 th of the search space.

Edge module¶

Edge implements interesting approach for controlling position size, is there any theory behind it?¶

The Edge module is mostly a result of brainstorming of @mishaker and @creslinux freqtrade team members.

You can find further info on expectancy, winrate, risk management and position size in the following sources: