If you've ever traded on a centralized exchange, no doubt you're familiar with the prolifiration of trading bots. But how many of you have actually used one? In the interest of learning and trying new things, I decided to try my hand at bot trading. But which platform to choose? After a few hours of presearching, I've narrowed down my decision to two, and decided it would be fun to pit them against each other in a winner take all battle. As I'm a complete noob when it comes to bot trading, I will attempt to learn as I go and will document my journey here on Publish0x. With that said, let's get on to the preview.
First - The Contenders
The first contender is a platform called 3Commas [ref. link]. The site features a variety of automated trading and management tools. It allows for rich customization of your trading algorithm, and currently supports 21 exchanges, including spot, futures, margin and options markets. The 4 membership plans range from free to $49.50 per month for a range of features which you can read here. In my case, I will be using the free plan.
The second contender is BitUniverse. A platform perhaps more well known as a portfolio management app, also offers a free trading bot for 25 of the most popular exchanges.
The signup for both platforms is essentially the same, after entering your email and password, you are asked to confirm the email and then enter the API key and secret key for your chosen exchange. These can be generated in the settings section of your chosen exchange. The API key allows the bot platforms to view your balances and execute trades on your behalf, but NOT to withdraw funds.
There are many other platforms I considered, and even signed up for, but eventually decided against, either because they were too complex, lacked a free trial/free plan or required too high of an initial trading budget, something I wouldn't want to risk without a test run first.
Second - The Venue
Although BINANCE seems like the obvious choice as it supports the most number of bot platforms and features perhaps the largest number of trading pairs, not to mention the most volume, I will instead be using FTX Exchange for this battle. My reasons are as follows:
1. Lower fees - My maker fees on FTX are currently at 0.019%, which includes a 5% discount from my referrer. I could get the fees lower if I stake FTT, but I haven't done so yet. This is much better than the 0.075% that Binance charges with the BNB discount factored in. I feel that as I expect my bots to make many trades each day, the higher fees on Binance would add up and end up costing me.
2. Subaccounts - FTX allows for easy creation of multiple subaccounts under 1 login, with separate funds and separate API keys. Therefore I can allocate the same amount to both of my bots, while keeping their wallets separate, allowing me to monitor their performance easily while keeping the respective bots from interfering with each other's strategy.
The downside is that many bot platforms don't yet support FTX, so if I decide to continue testing other platforms, I may utilize Binance as the venue in the future.
Click here if you would like to read more about my impressions of FTX Exchange, and if you'd like to use the exchange, please feel free to use my referral link to get %5 off your trading fees.
Third - The Rules
Each bot will be allocated exactly $100, and be set to trade the BTC/USD pair. Initially both strategies required me to convert about 50% of that to BTC, which was done at the best available market price at the time of set up. For the setup, I'm using the most basic AI automated grid bot as recommended by each respective platform. Both platforms offer advanced customization, but I'll save that for a later time. I will review the performance of the bots in 1 month, hopefully they won't let me down. The battle will continue until a winner becomes obvious.
Fourth - The Strategies
Right off the bat, BitUniverse went with a greater number of grids and smaller amounts per grid, perhaps we can look at this as the contender with the persistent jab who wears you out over the course of many rounds. 3Commas used fewer grids with larger amounts, this is your Mike Tyson, 3Commas is going for the KO. Which strategy will reign supreme? We will see.
Fifth - Initial Impressions
It took just minutes to set up both bots, as I went with the preset version, but 3Commas offers a much greater selection of bots and bot customization options, on BitUniverse you're pretty much limited to grid bots. Both platforms offer a terminal for monitoring your trades and your bot performance, and are generally intuitive and easy to use, although slightly cluttered.
Here is what the 3Commas bot terminal looks like, and the corresponding chart on the FTX mobile app.
And here is the same for BitUniverse.
Both platforms also offer their own apps, these I will look at later. In the end, these are all just minor features, what I'm really interested in, is which bot performs better.
I will continue to update the progress of my bots here on Publish0x, so please follow for regular updates, and comment with your bot trading experiences or suggestions. Also, if you have a prediction for the winner of this battle, please post it in the comments!
Thank you for reading, and remember to enjoy the good things in life!
