When you buy and sell BTC for USD you should be trying to increase your USD balance. Buy BTC for low value in dollars, sell high for more dollars. Over the past week of micro-trading I've had to change my mentality. I started out trying to trade up .5 BTC to 1 full BTC and with the current volatility, I was on track. I caught myself halfway through the week - my BTC balance was not increasing as steadily as my USD balance was. In essence, when you trade on this current uptrend, you hope that the price of BTC will drop and you will be able to snap up lots of BTC to dump at for a better fiat price. As the trend goes up, I can buy fewer BTC at the high price, but my USD balance is increasing.

TL,DR - you're looking at the wrong charts if you want to trade for BTC balance. You need to be selling and buying USD on the BTC value.

What exactly would someone have to do differently to increase bitcoin than what he is doing now to increase fiat?

You say you want to buy and sell USD with Bitcoin.  But wouldn't you still be doing the same thing?

If you want to buy as much USD as you can with your BTC, you need to wait until USD is low.  Then buy as much as you can.  Then once the price of USD rises and starts coming back down, you sell your USD back for more BTC.

Example:
If 1 BTC = $600 then $1 = 0.00167 BTC, Point A
If 1 BTC = $500 then $1 = 0.00200 BTC, Point B

In the example above, USD is at its lowest (0.00167) BTC at point A when BTC is at it's highest ($600).  Likewise, USD is at its highest (0.00200) at point B when BTC is at it's lowest ($500).

Is this not the exact same thing?  Sure you could invert the graph, but you would just be flipping it upside down. The crossovers will still come at the same points.  You would still trade BTC for USD at point A and trade USD for bitcoin at point B.

If I am wrong, someone please explain why.  Thank you!

Hi Boozezela ,
   I would be very interested in seeing the logs for this if any of you still have them. Butter will trade all your currency for either Fiat or BTC once you enable it depending on the market signal. Depending on when the signal was triggered this may be an issue because remember: Butter issues "standing" buy or sell orders depending on the trend.

Regardless, I understand the issue here and I will bring it up with the developer to revise the mechanics of this.

Any feedback is welcome .

Pablo.

M,
  Another great suggestion, this was already on the board, we will be likely looking into this as soon as there is some free development time .

Pablo.

  ^
This

If you don't understand this, you are hurting yourself financially in the long term.

I absolutely didn't say that. What I've asked is to see some profitability stats, but it's treated as super-secret data instead to be analyzed by the community. No need to see the exact amounts how many someone traded, normalize it to units (BTC/US$). For example, if you started with 2.4 BTC, divide start/end figures with 2.4 and let's see how much is gained for 1 BTC. Than we will see if there is a value to this bot or not. Maybe some trading strategies produced gains in BTC.

There is no secret and you don't need any chart or excel spreadsheet.
It is simple arithmetic common sense: every time you sell high and THEN buy low the balance in BTC increases.

Assuming you are operating in a commission free market for the sake of simplicity:
You buy 1BTC at $650 and hold till the value rises to $700, then you sell > you have $700 that means a $50 profit.
Now you wait very patiently for the price to drop below $650. At $640 you buy and hold. Now you have 1.09375 BTC.

Rinse and repeat 100 times and your balance in BTC will increase. Is it worth your time? Probably not because it is unlikely that BTC value would drop to 630, 610, 590, 410 and so on and even with a sawtooth-like pattern it will keep rising and rising and rising.

There will be instances where you will buy higher that 650 and sell higher than 700 and slightly increase the balance in BTC simply because you are leveraging on a higher BTC balance but the increase will be negligible.

So if you have the money to do so, every time there is a sensible price drop, just buy new BTC with fresh money. You don't need a BOT to do so, you just need a chart.

Please explain how to trade usd-btc not btc-usd.  I'm afraid I don't see the difference.

The discussions of profiting USD vs BTC are missing the point.

The real question is, does the EMA strategy beat buy-and-hold (i.e., will I have more or less converted BTC after using the bot)? The answer seems to be it depends on the conditions of the market.
During this recent insane rally, I don't see any EMA beating buy-and-hold. Another algorithmic strategy I'm using similarly performed worse than buy-and-hold in this period. I have had success trading half-manually with this bot entering the short position and then manually buying back BTC when I have some gains and I see a trend reversal. EMA has a lag in tracking the trend reversal and the market is moving very fast.

I've been using the bot with close supervision for about 2 weeks and I'm up about 8% in BTC. The largest gain was made by manually buying back during the flash crash two days ago. YMMV.

Every trading strategy needs a benchmark to which it will relate and measure it's success. In trading stocks traders mostly use S&P 500 as that benchmark. If you are trading stocks/US$ and you end with less value than simply buying S&P 500 and holding it, usually it's considered bad strategy. If you trade cryptocurrency, BTC/US$, end you end with less value than Buy&Hold strategy - you are doing it wrong. Now, increasing your US$ portfolio not necessarily means you will in the long run end with more than Buy&Hold, but increasing BTC, due to a long term deflation and upward trend in BTC, it is certain to beat Buy&Hold. Deflation is built into BTC, but even if it was not, long term trend since 2009 is obvious, and there is not a single analysis that predicts sliding of BTC value in the long term.

To summarize: If you are using bots in trading, and you are increasing your US$ amount you may be (but not necessarily) trading successfully, if you are increasing your BTC amount you are certainly trading successfully.