A way to make up for a loss-making position is our Short and Trailing Stop-Short feature. It's an exciting feature for traders that are looking for an alternative for their traditional stop-loss.
Shorting is the practice of making a profit while the price of an asset goes down. Our way of shorting is a little bit different than "traditional" shorting. Our shorting is more like a buyback function.
When you expect a position to make a more significant loss, you initiate a Short, and your bot will sell the position. When you think the price has reached its bottom, you consolidate your short and directly buy back the position.
Let's say you bought 1 BTC for 8000 USD, and you get a hunch that BTC is going to drop in value. You can then go to your Cryptohopper dashboard and click "short" on your BTC position. Cryptohopper will then sell your BTC, reserves these funds, and tracks the position in your shorting tab. You can then set up a buyback price, indicating at what price you want to buy back the asset. It will then always be monitoring the price change, and if/when it hits your chosen buyback price, your hopper will automatically repurchase it.
Shorting can be done automatically and manually, so it’s an exciting feature for manual and automatic traders.
Manual Shorting
Manual shorting can be initiated by directly selecting a position and select “Short positions” from the bulk
actions menu. This will move the position to “Short Positions”. Effectively, your position has been sold for your base currency, but your Hopper will track the position now and calculated the “profit” you have from selling it and rebuying it later. This can be done both from the regular as the advanced view.
Let’s say you’ve shorted some positions. How does the reporting work? What do all the numbers mean?
The Percentage on the left indicates your result. This is different from open positions because a positive number will actually reflect a decline in price.
So take QKC - since you sold it, the position has gone down 2.25%. This figure is green because you saved yourself from a 2.25% loss.
Moving on to the figure on the right, in the case of QKC, you see in yellow: -13.79%. This figure indicates your actual result.
QKC was sold at -16.04%, but since your position has gone down 2.25%, your actual indicates a loss of -13.79%. The actual figure will show you at what point you could buy back an investment to help you break even on bags (loss-making positions).
Automatic Shorting
Manual shorting is the easy part, but we’re algorithmic traders, so it’s in our nature to automate as much as we can. To do this, we do need to understand the configurations that we can adjust. This is also where you could use the “Trailing Stop-Short”. A great tool to automate your shorting. Like a Trailing Stop-Buy and the Trailing Stop-Loss, the Trailing Stop-Shorts keeps tracking the price so that it helps you close the short when the price rises again.
Go to your Base Config -> select “Shorting Settings” -> and enable, you won’t guess it, “Automatic Shorting”.
To further configure shorting correctly, there are a few basic configurations. Ask yourself these questions:
When do you want your Hopper to start shorting automatically?
Most often, this is when a specific position is in a loss. You can enable that when your strategy sends a sell signal (indicating that it will go down). We advise the first option for beginners.
When should your short be “liquidated”, or better said, when should your Hopper buy back the position?
