Why I haven’t been writing much about new trading bot developments
As you probably have noticed I haven’t been writing much about new trading bot developments. The reason for this is that I don’t like to write about new developments unless I have tried these myself, I’ve reported on bots I didn’t use in the past but I never felt very confident writing about it other than just notifying people of their existence and their feature sets.
A lot has changed since I started this blog and despite all the new features, not much can still impress me. I tend to avoid software or techniques that are overly complex, there’s beauty in simplicity. If it takes me hours to figure out how something works or should be done, generally it is not worth those few hours of my time. It usually means the product is not well designed or it’s too complex to make it work in a consistent manner and I don’t want to spend lots of time figuring it out. The whole reason to use trading bots is that you don’t have the time or interest to spend a lot of time behind your computer screen. If I have to spend so much time behind the screen I might as well place 1 or 2 trades/day myself and have better results overall.
I will do a few updates soon on some of the bots I’ve used in the past to highlight new developments and keep you up to date, however, I have pretty much settled on 2 trading techniques that have proven to me to work in almost every circumstance and are simple and pretty much set and forget.
While most of my efforts in the past were focused on finding the best trading algorithm based on technical analysis I’ve reverted on this position and abandoned it totally. The issue with technical analysis is that it works for a particular market and to accommodate for market changes or even other coins you need to create complex algorithms and setups that adapt to every single situation. Often you can trade for 2 months and make huge profits to see it all disappear the 3rd month because of some drastic change in the market your algorithm can’t deal with or because you get stuck with some coin you can’t sell for months other than at a loss to keep on trading.
Rather than anticipating market changes and using predictive trading methods I’ve settled on more “reactive” or “market agnostic” methods. In other words trade “after” something happened rather than “before” something is supposed to happen or just ignore it altogether.
QLF trading
One of those ways of trading is QFL. I’ve mentioned this technique before, without going in detail again it basically watches for coins to collapse and break a support level called “base”. So rather than predicting a rise you simply buy after a fall, then let the coin recover from the drop and make a profit.
To automate QFL I relied on Crypto Base Scanner which is heavily based on the QFL trading strategy. It automatically searches for support levels in the chart and alerts you when a support level or base is broken.
To trade with QFL I use Zignaly (where it’s integrated) but you can also use other bots such as 3commas or Apex that also support QFL. The reason I prefer Zignaly is that they support all trading pairs in 1 bot, which is easier to set up and it’s more cost-effective and generally does a good job. But 3commas or Apex work fine and have some more advanced features, so if you want those features I would definitely look into those. Cryptophp is another one that’s affordable and great for trading signals.
Crypto Base Scanner will send signals to the bot if a market has broken a support level with a percentage equal to the median drop level.
As you can see in the results below I don’t do many trades, I limit my trades to those pairs that have shown a good success rate in the past and I also limit based on volume.
I have set a 70% success rate as a minimum requirement. I miss a lot of great opportunities this way but I limit failing trades also. I also require a minimum of 5 BTC in volume, lower than that gets you stuck in trades. Another important thing to do is to block low-value coins, while they generally can make the most profit they’re very unreliable. Setting up a blacklist is a good way to do this.
Grid trading
Grid trading is another trading technique that operates regardless of how the market swings. It basically looks at the support and resistance levels of the past X days and then divides everything up in sublevels between that resistance and support level. That’s the grid and each time the price hits the grid down or up it’ll buy or sell. Gridbots make hundreds of small trades consistently and gradually rather than placing a few large trades. Over time this usually works out positive even if the market drops because all of the small profits made which offset the drop and upon market recovery give you a nice profit. Set up bots in coins you’d wanna keep long term that way a drop in value would not be an issue as you want to stay in that coin anyway.
Over 1326 trades returned $109 USDT on an investment of just $992 or nearly 11% for 1 month by catching each little profit it could.
For grid trading I’ve settled on Pionex, for the simple reason that they’re easy to set up, they have a broad range of pairs to trade, including leveraged pairs, have no fixed cost at all, a low commission fee and an AI feature that figures out the optimal grid parameters for you.
Recently 3commas also added grid trading to their bot so if you are looking for an all-purpose bot and trading platform for both QFL, manual trading and grid trading 3commas has you covered.
Of course for grid trading to be more successful it’s important to plan your entry & exist well, that’s basically the only time I use technical analysis to get in and out. You also need to check every now and again to see if your bot is still trading within its upper and lower limits and if not adjust. A way to avoid this is to use Infinity Grids.
So as you can see the main reason I haven’t been looking into other bots is that I’m happy with the setup I have, it might not return the biggest profits but it’s consistent over time. This has reduced my stress levels and the need to keep watching the crypto market as much as I used to do.
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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.
