User Guide

Overview

CryptoDashApp.jl creates a dashboard that allows the user to monitor historical cryptocurrency market data and calculate some key technical indicators. Data is obtained from Alpha Vantage for which an API key is necessary. Free API keys can be created here.

Do note that the number of API calls are restricted to five per minute and 500 requests per day (more than enough for our app). We somewhat circumvent the former limitation by saving the data to the disk in the form of CSV files. Before downloading fresh data for a given date, older files are deleted.

App UI

Data type and currency of interest can be selected via drop-down lists. Currently, data for only one currency can be viewed at a time. Averaging window (for calculating various moving averages) and historical timeframe can be selected via checkboxes.

The plots are interactive, which means you can hover your cursor over the data points to see their value, and also zoom into a particular region. There is also an option to download the plot as a png file. By clicking on the legends, you can turn off the display for that data, which is useful for example when you want to look at only a certain type of data.

Available modes

Average price + Daily trade

  • Left plot shows the daily average price for a given currency. Averaging is done by taking the mean of open, close, high and low price for all days. When a moving average window other than 1-day is selected, the SMA (Simple Moving Average), WMA (Weighted Moving Average) and EMA (Exponential Moving Average) are also visible.

  • Right plot shows the daily trade data, which is simply the product of volume (number of coins) multiplied by the average price.

Candlestick + Volume

  • Left plot shows the candlestick data for selected timeframe.

  • Right plot shows the daily volume (number of coins) for the selected timeframe.

Cumulative + Daily return

  • Left plot shows the cumulative return that will be obtained from a given starting date.

  • Right plot shows the daily return distribution. Green indicates an increase in price, whereas red indicates the opposite. Percentage share of green/red is also indicated in the legend.

Daily volatility

  • This plot shows the distribution of the daily price change for a given currency over the specified timeframe. A wider distribution (higher 3σ) indicates a more volatile behavior.

MACD + Signal

  • Left plot shows the daily average price data along with 12-day and 26-day EMAs. These are used to calculate the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) indicator, which is shown on the right.

  • Right plot shows the MACD (26-day EMA subtracted from 12-day EMA) along with its signal line (9-day EMA of the MACD). A buy signal occurs when MACD crosses the signal line from below, and a sell signal occurs when the crossing is from above. Distance between the MACD and the signal line is shown via bars in the same plot, with green bars (bullish momentum) indicating the region where MACD > signal, and red bars (bearish momentum) for the opposite. For more description, see link.

Linear regression channel

  • This metric can be used to identify trends and their direction. Plot shows a linear regression line that is the best fit to the data available for the selected duration. The upper channel line runs parallel to the linear regression line, and is located two standard deviations above it. Same goes for the lower channel line except that it's located two standard deviations below.

  • When the price drops below the lower channel, it is considered as a buy signal. Similarly, price rising above the upper channel leads to a sell signal. If the price spends time outside the channel, it could indicate that a trend reversal is imminent.

  • Plot title also contains $R^2$, which is a statistical measure representing the proportion of variation in the dependent variable that is explained by different features (independent variables) in this model. A value closer to 1 (maximum) indicates a good fit. The linear regression channel metric will therefore not be very useful when $R^2 < 0.50$.

Bollinger bands

  • These are price envelopes plotted at two standard deviations (std) above (upper band) and below (lower band) the simple moving average of the daily price. Since the distance towards the bands is based on std, it adjusts in response to the price volatility.

  • When the bands move closer (tighten during low volatility), it raises the chances of a sharp price movement in either direction. On the contrary, diverging bands indicate high volatility, which might also indicate the end for any existing trend.

  • Prices often bounce between the two bands, which could be used to identify potential price targets. For example, when a price bounces off of the lower band, and crosses the moving average, the upper band might be considered as the next profit target. Prices can also cross the bands during strong trends.

  • For more description, see link.

Fundamental Cryptocurrency Asset Score (FCAS) data

  • Removed from the app since this is no longer provided by AlphaVantage.

Following modes make use of the CoinGecko API

Developer + Community data

  • Left plot shows various developer metrics (number of stars in the repository, commits, closed issues, pull requests etc.) that gives us an idea on how active the software development team is for a given cryptocurrency. In particular, for an actively maintained repository, the delta between the number of "closed issues" and the number of "total issues" should not be too big.

  • Right plot shows social media activity (number of followers, accounts etc.) on popular platforms such as reddit, telegram and twitter.

Exchange volume data per currency

  • Left plot shows the total volume (number of coins) that has been traded over last 24 hours for the selected cryptocurrency on the top ten exchanges.

  • Right plot shows the USD equivalent for the same data.

Overall exchange volume data

  • This stacked bar plot shows the total 24-hr volume (in BTC) of all the cryptocurrencies traded on various exchanges over the course of last 30 days.

Run app

CryptoDashApp.run_app — Method
run_app(port::Int64)

Start the app on the given port.

Arguments

  • port::Int64 : Port number, for example 8056

Example

julia> run_app(8056)
[ Info: data folder exists, cleanup action will be performed!
[ Info: Listening on: 0.0.0.0:8056
[ Info: Fetching BTC price/vol data from Alpha Vantage