At first, 3commas might seem a bit overwhelming and intimidating because all of the options it offers but let’s just go through them one by one.
Dashboard
The dashboard gives you an overview of BTC and ETH price, your ‘Total Balance’ and Today’s change.
Below this overview you find 4 blocks:
- Connect to the exchange: This is where you enter the API details of your exchange.
- SmartTrade: This is where you place your “smart” trades, a trading interface similar to what you have on your exchange but with more bells & whistles to maximise your profits.
- Automated trading bot: This is where you have a bot (or multiple bots) that based on TradingView’s recommendation for a buy or strong buy places trades and uses a direct cost averaging strategy to make profits.
- Invite & earn: You can give a friend a 10% discount and earn 20% on his or her trading fee deposits.
Below these, you’ll find the stats for best performing simple bots (bots with one trading-pair), overall stats and the best trading-pairs of the day.
Underneath it you’ll see the best composite bots, these are bots dealing with multiple trading pairs.
At the bottom, there’s an aggregated overview of all your connected exchanges followed by a separate view of their balances.
At the very end of the page, you’ll see an overview of different portfolios and their performance, followed by the top marketing cap coins with their performance.
But let’s continue to the more important part.
SmartTrade
SmartTrade is basically one single uniform interface to trade on all your exchanges. What sets it apart is the extra possibilities it offers to place your buys and sells while maximising profit.
My favourite part is trailing. So let’s explain this first.
If you have been trading on the stock market you’re probably familiar with trailing stops. If you are unfamiliar with the concept let me just explain to you how it works.
A trailing stop is basically a stop loss trigger but rather than a stop that triggers at a fixed price it’s a trigger that follows your price and goes up with it, in other words, it’s relative your price.
So let’s say your coin is worth 1 satoshi and you set a trailing stop at -5% the coin will be sold when your price drops by 5%. So as soon as your price hits 0.95 your coin will be sold to preserve further losses. But if your coin goes up to 2 satoshis, the stop won’t stay at 0.95 but will move up too. Your new stop will be 1.95.
3commas has two trailing stop mechanisms built-in to really squeeze out the maximum gains.
Smart Trade overview
Trading Terminal
This is probably the intimidating part, so let’s break it down one by one.
SmartTrade/SmartSell
- Units: The amount of the currency you wanna buy (or sell) in this case ETH
- Buy Price: Price you wanna pay (more in detail below)
- Total: Total size of your order
- Size from available amount: lets you quickly choose an amount based on a % of your total base currency
Now the buy price can be set in different ways. You can pick:
- Bid: The current highest bid price (what buyers want to pay)
- Ask: The current lowest ask price (what sellers want to get)
- Last: Price of the last transaction
- Limit: the limit price you want to pay
- Market: the current market price
- Condition: The limit that should trigger a market order
Set Take Profit
- Market order: if you want the order to be executed at market price (fast execution but the price may fluctuate) when the target price is reached.
- Limit order: If you want the order to be executed at the target price 3 options here: BID/ASK/LAST
- The slider lets you set the percentage gain you anticipate
If you click on Split Targets you’ll see another % slider appear
This slider sets the quantity of your order that you want to sell at the % you have set with the first slider. Let’s say your order is 1 ETH but you don’t want to sell it all at once at the same target price. You come up with 2 targets and sell half of your 1 ETH at each target point. Then you would set this slider to 50%. This way you allocate 50% to be sold at the percentage you selected with the first slider. Once done click on Add TP target and set the price for the rest of your order.
As a result, you get the picture above. Your initial order split in two to be sold at two different target prices.
As if those features aren’t amazing enough they add trailing to it too.
Trailing for last target allows you to let your last target run even further up than what you have set as a target. If it goes up more it will have an extra trailing stop (as described above) of the percentage you chose with the slider. The trailing stop will follow the price and sell immediately once it drops by x% ( 1% in this case).
Set Stop Loss
Here you define your stop loss, not to be confused with the trailing stop from the previous Set Take Profit.*
This is the price at which you sell the order if it goes down instead of up.
However, if you set it to Market order you can enable Trailing converting this fixed stop into a trailing stop for your order.
If these 2 trailing stops confuse you think of it this way:
- the Set Take Profit trailing stop only starts when your targets are reached its function is to squeeze out as much profit as possible
- the Set Stop Loss trailing stop is there to minimise losses when your targets are not reached
Once your order is created it will look like the picture below and you have a nice graphical presentation of your buy price, your stop-loss and your target.
Under actions you can find the option to Panic sell (eg. if a sudden crash happens), to edit your order and update the parameters or to just cancel it.
BOTS
The first thing you see under bots is an overview of the best bots, which you can copy by viewing the config and adding the bot.
My bots
This section is where you create your bot and where you can view your bots.
Currently, there are 3 type of bots:
- Simple bot
- Short bot
- Composite bot
Simple bot: This is a bot for 1 base pair, it’s a bot for going long, simply put if you expect the coin on the right side of your coin-pair(e.g. ADA) to go up and you select BTC_ADA then you’re going long on ADA. The coin at the right side of the coin-pair is the one you’re betting on rising in this case ADA, the coin on the left-side, BTC is what you want to increase by buying ADA.
This bot starts by placing buy orders for ADA and placing sell orders for ADA at a higher rate. The difference is profit in BTC.
Short bot: This is a bot for 1 base pair, it’s a bot for going short, simply put if you expect the coin on the right-side (e.g. BTC) to go down and you currently have BTC in your account and you select USDT_BTC then you’re going short on BTC (but long on TUSD). The coin at the right-side of the coin-pair is the one you’re betting on to drop in value in this case BTC, the coin on the left-side, USDT is what you want to increase by selling BTC.
This bot starts by placing sell orders for BTC and placing buy orders for BTC at a lower rate. The difference is profit in USDT.
Composite bot: is similar to the simple bot but it supports multiple coin-pairs.
Before explaining the main settings, it might be good to explain how the bot actually works as it’s quite different from how other bots work. It doesn’t use any technical indicators like RSI, MACD or Bollinger bands but bases it’s buying decision on TradingViews analysis of the coin.
TradingView has a Cryptocurrency Signal Finder:
This Finder issues buy or strong buy or sell and strong sell labels. This bot uses these labels to decide if something is good to place buys. To place sells it uses a fixed profit percentage, our Target profit(%).
The main algorithm is very simple. It basically buys low & sells higher. The bot basically buys at the current rate and immediately sets a sell order 1 or 2% higher, depending on how you have set your Target profit(%). When the target is hit the sell happens almost immediately since the buy order is already lined up on the exchange. No time is wasted placing the sell order when the target is reached as it’s set beforehand.
But, but…what if the price drops? In that case, bot automatically places safety-orders, which are lower than the last buy-order price every X%. So basically the bot is automatically averaging down and thus moving your profit target lower. On the next bounce, the coin is sold with a profit.
Main settings
- Name: the name you give your bot
- Exchange: the exchange you want to use for you bot
- Recommended pairs: Based on the most successful deals in the last 24 hour
- Pair: The coin-pair you want to use
- Pairs: Available only for composite bots. Only pairs from 1 base currency can be combined in 1 composite bot, “***_ALL” adds all coins, Clear removes all.
- Max active deals simultaneously: Available only for composite bots. How many deals the bot may open at the same time. If you have more bots than your funds allow for it will pick the most promising within your budget.
- Base trade size: Initial trade size. The bot will use this amount for the first buy order. If put here 0.2 and select BTC_XRP pair for the bot, then launch it, the bot will buy XRP for 0.2 BTC.
- Safety trade size: Safety orders are basically orders used to do (dollar) cost averaging to bring your profit target lower when the coin goes down.
Here’s a short example of how cost averaging works.
Let’s say you buy 1 coin X at $90 and the price of your coin drops to $45, you’re at a 50% loss. Dollar cost averaging would for example buy 3 times this coin X at $45. So now you have spend $45x3 + your initial $90 and you end up with 4 coins. This means your average cost per coin now is ($45x3 + $90)/4 or $56.25 you’re loss is now $56.25 -$45 = $11.25 per coin instead of $45 per coin. This means if the market goes up to $56.11 you’ll be break-even no need to sweat it out till $90.
The bot is going to place safety orders immediately after you have opened the trade to average your buy price in case your coin goes down. The size of each safety order is what you fill in here. If you put 0.2 and the bot will place three safety orders on -1%, -2% and -3% from starting price each 0.2 BTC in size.
- Target profit (%): the percentage of profit you want for your bot to make. The bot will place a sell order x% higher after the initial trade.
- Take profit type:
Percentage from base trade: the bot will determine TakeProfit target from the initial order size, without taking total bought volume into consideration. Let’s say the initial trade size is $100 and target profit 5% ($5), after this the price drops. As a result, the bot bought coin on $900 more using safety orders, and now the total trade volume is $1000. The bot will place sell order in a way to get $5 profit (5% from $100) and not $50 (5% from $1000).
Percentage from total volume: the bot will take profit from total trade amount. From the previous example, the bot will place sell order in a way to get $50 (5% from $1000).
- Max safety trades count: The maximum amount of safety orders that can be executed for 1 deal.
- Max active safety trades count: Keyword is “active” here. Say you set 5 as the maximum amount of safety orders and 3 active, the bot will place 3 safety orders right after the coin is bought and 2 are not placed but kept as potential spare orders should they be needed. Now if you would set the Max active safety trade’s count to 5 it would set all 5 immediately.
- Price deviation to open safety trades: This is basically the percentage interval between each order. If it’s e.g. 3% on a $100 order the 3 first safety orders are placed at $97, $92.15 en $89,39 (or 3% from each consecutive amount)
- Safety order volume scale: This basically multiplies the volume of your safety trade on each new safety trade. Say your safety trade size is 0.1 BTC and scale is 2 then the next safety order would be 0.1*2 or 0.2 BTC, the next one 0.4 BTC, the one after 0.8 BTC …etc
- Safety order step scale: this will not scale the volume of your safety order but it will scale the interval. So instead of equal interval percentages for price deviation, the interval increases by multiplying the price deviation by the factor you enter here. If your price deviation is 1% and your step scale is 2 it will place safety buys at -1%, -2% or 1%*2. The next one will be at -4%, -8% and so on.
- Don’t start trade with a trading 24h volume less than: The bot will only trade if the coin has a 24h volume more than the amount entered here. If you create a bot with all BTC_*** pairs and set it to 500, the bot will trade only coins with 24h volume no less than 500 BTC. If the bot is using no BTC_*** pairs but for example, ETH_*** this filter will still use BTC for the calculations. The 24h volume will be automatically converted to BTC.
Assistant
Shows helpful information about your configured bot. You can, for example, see if your configuration exceeds the funds in your account.
Trade start condition
Lets you pick which time frame from the TradingView scanner it should use to determine the buy condition. And whether it should look for Buy, Strong Buy or Sell and Strong Sell labelled coins.
Bot analytics
An overview of best bots similar to what you find on the dashboard.
Trader Diary
A place where you can create reports
Portfolios
Where you can compare, analyse portfolios and follow portfolios. Ideally, if you are looking more into diversifying your assets or want to copy successful portfolios.
My Plan
All the available plans, your own current plan and the place were you buy credit to pay for your commission cost.
One important thing if you‘re on no plan but commission or one of the “cheaper” plans you have to pay a 50% commission either on simple or composite bots. To pay for it you need to purchase credit without it your bot won’t start. It’s only deducted on successful sells.
Free trial here
Other bots:
The above references an opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice and may contain affiliate links. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.
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