Identifying Active Trading Strategies in the Bitcoin Market CS145 Team CryptoBot

The goal of this paper was to attempt to characterize the traders in the bitcoin market. Specifically, this paper attempted to analyze whether any technical-analysis based trading strategies were being used traders in the bitcoin market, and if so, which strategies were being employed and to what degree. The paper focused on simple trading strategies based on well-understood indicators such as EMA/SMA crossover. In order to test these strategies, we constructed a framework that allowed us to define different bots based on TA functions and use historical data to backtest the strategies. We examined volume at the time intervals these strategies indicated as a buy/sell opportunity to volume during other similar time intervals in order to determine if the market behaved differently at the predicted buy/sell opportunities.