In the early days of cryptocurrency trading one of the primary strategies that traders used to make profits was arbitrage – i.e. buying assets in one market and then selling them in another for a higher price, thus earning profit on the difference. As cryptocurrency exchanges were decentralized, there were often large differentials between prices offered on various exchanges, meaning that profits could be made through arbitrage.
Although the spread between exchanges are much smaller now, they do still appear from time to time and trading bots can assist users in making the most of these differentials.
In addition, arbitrage can also be utilized in traders looking to involve futures contracts in their trading strategies by benefiting from any difference that exists between a futures contract and its underlying asset, by considering futures contracts that are traded on various different exchanges.
Trading bots can also allow investors to use the market making strategy.
This strategy provides for “continuous buy and sell prices on a variety of spot digital currencies and digital currency derivatives contracts” in an effort to “capture the spread between the buy and sell price”.In order to carry out the market making strategies, in involves making both buy and sell limit orders near the existing market place.
As prices fluctuate, the trading bot will automatically and continuously place limit orders in order to profit from the spread. Although this may be profitable at certain periods, the intense competition around this strategy can result in it being unprofitable, especially in low liquidity environments.
Do Trading Bots Work?
Trading bots work by reacting to the market.
It gathers the data it needs in order to execute a trade based on analysis of the trading platform. However, with Cryptocurrency, the trading platform only tells half of the story, with many rises and falls being based on other sources that cannot be programmed into the bot for analysis.
In addition, as noted above, the spread between the exchanges has flattened somewhat, meaning that the opportunities for inter-exchange arbitrage are much lower than in previous years.
Many trading bots use what is known as an exponential moving average (EMA) as a starting point for analyzing the market.
EMA’s track market prices over a set time period, and bots can be programmed to react to what that price does – such as moving beyond certain thresholds.
By programming the bots, traders can set their thresholds to correspond with their risk appetites. However, one of the downsides of EMA is that it is based on past history, which, as all traders will know, is not indicative of future performance, especially in the cryptocurrency industry where volatility is rife.
Therefore the question of whether trading bots work is a multi-faceted one in which the problem answer is that they work, but not necessarily for everybody.
Trading bots offer a variety of advantages, including having constant interaction with the market, as well as the not-insubstantial factor of removing the emotion from trading. However, on the other hand, by using the wrong trading strategy or relying on the trading strategy of others, a trading bot could simply end up automating a set of poor market trading decisions.