Gekko: Documentation for candleSize/History

[chevinbrown]

There's not a good explanation of exactly how gekko uses candleSize...or at least, I don't have the base understanding to get it.

Candlesize (in config) means how many candles until it begins trading live? If candleSize is too low, will the trading advisor give poor advice? Will a low candle count skew the actual market conditions? Please advise.

[consp]

CandleSize is the number of 1 minute candles are put into one 'real' candle. So you can differentiate between the candle sizes on a 1 minute scale.

Eg. CandleSize=5 gives 12 candles per hour.
If the market is slow you can use bigger candles.
See it as a histogram: If you make the bars wider you get less sudden changes but might miss a changing trend (it is hidden). If you make them too small it will show too much noise.
Take a look at this image: http://www.cdn.sciencebuddies.org/Files/4464/7/faq_hist.png and see that the noise in the left top graph is bigger, wile the general trend is visible there are too many noisy signals. If you 'widen' the bar they are leveled out but you lose sudden changes in the trend.

This is only an analogy; there is a lot more to it.

[chevinbrown]

So is the default scale a recommended setting? Using that setting costs me two days to build a history...

[askmike]

There is no recommended setting, Gekko is a tool you can use when you know what settings you want (or you can use it to try a bunch).