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I Entrusted $3,000 to an AI Trading Bot for Crypto: Here’s What Happened

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valuezone 26 February 2024

I Entrusted $3,000 to an AI Trading Bot for Crypto: Here’s What Happened

Introduction to AI Crypto Trading

How much money can I make in 4 days from AI crypto trading bots? That’s the question I set out to answer in this article. I decided to open up two crypto trading bots with a total of $3,000 and see just how easy or difficult it is to make money.

I’m relatively new to the AI crypto trading bot space, but I’m eager to experiment and see how successful some of these strategies can be. There are influencers out there who claim that you can make $100 or even $1,000 a day from trading bots, suggesting they’re a sort of free money glitch. But how true is that? How easy is it to make money using these bots? This is the entire point of my week’s experiment.


The Experiment Begins

This is the first episode of a new series where I test new crypto products in real-time using real money. I’ll experiment with some of the most popular products on the market to see if they actually work. I believe this will be incredibly valuable for you because you’ll find out what works and what doesn’t.

We’re going to have a lot of fun along the way, and maybe we’ll even discover some profitable AI crypto trading strategies that prove lucrative in the long term. In today’s video, we’re focusing on grid bots, specifically the OKX grid bot. I’ll document the entire process on camera, so you’ll see everything from start to finish.

Understanding Grid Bots

Before investing in these bots, I need to explain what grid bots do and how they work. Futures grid trading is an automated AI crypto trading strategy that trades futures contracts at preset intervals within a specific price range. This strategy continuously buys low and sells high for each predefined grid, profiting off market volatility.

Essentially, it doesn’t matter if the price goes up or down, as long as there’s volatility, there’s an opportunity for the grid to make a profit. The essence of a futures grid is volatility arbitrage, making the strategy most suitable when the market is moving sideways or is volatile within a specific range. There are long futures grids, short futures grids, and neutral futures grids, which present opportunities on both the long and short side, depending on market movement.

Setting Up the Bots

I’m super excited to test these out. If you visit the OKX website and go to the trading section, you can click on the trading bot section, which brings you to a dashboard that allows you to pick from pre-built bots or create your own AI crypto trading bot. I’m going to set up a new bot to test out for the remainder of the week.

I’ll start with a Bitcoin bot, and I think I’ll also open up a Solana bot. First, let’s dive into the Bitcoin strategy. In the Futures grid section, I can open a Bitcoin bot with leverage. If you click on the spot grid section, you can open a Bitcoin bot using purely spot trading, with no margin. I’ll be making a manual strategy today, selecting the price range for the bot to execute across.

Defining the Strategy

Grid bots create a grid of buy and sell zones, enabling the bot to automatically take trades based on predetermined criteria. I need to define the price range for the grids. The reason I’m focusing on Bitcoin is that it’s currently chopping sideways, which is ideal for setting up a bot strategy like this one.

The price will oscillate and chop between the buy and sell grids. I’ll set the lower limit slightly below the current low and the upper limit slightly above the current high. For grid mode and quantity, I’ll go with 12 grids, spreading them evenly across the range. The more grids you use, the more buy and sell orders will take place, increasing risk if the price moves dramatically.

Fewer grids mean fewer orders and longer times between trades. I think 12 grids is a good balance, giving a profit per grid of about 4.4 to 4.8%. I’ll be using 10x leverage, investing $2,000 out of a $3,000 bankroll. The remaining $1,000 will be allocated for the Solana AI crypto trading bot that I’ll set up after the Bitcoin trade.

Advanced Settings and Launching the Bot

For the advanced settings, I’ll keep the trigger type as instant. I’m setting up a neutral bot, which means it won’t start with a long or short bias. A trade will trigger as soon as it hits our first grid. I’ll also set a take profit (TP) price above the highest wick but won’t set a stop loss.

I’ll be monitoring this bot constantly, so I can manually stop it if needed. Now, I’ll create the bot, and you can see all the settings and confirm. Our bot is officially created, and I’m eager to see how it performs over the next few days. But before that, I want to set up one more bot, this time for Solana.

Setting Up the Solana Bot

I’m looking through the strategies on OKX, and it’s fascinating to see that you can use manual bots or their predetermined selection of AI bots. For Solana, I’ll click on the AI strategy section. There are various strategies that have been backtested by OKX, including short futures grids, long futures grids, and neutral futures grids.

Solana is in a range structure, similar to Bitcoin, making it an interesting case for AI crypto trading. I’ll invest $1,000 into this bot, using 7x leverage, slightly lower than my Bitcoin position. I’ll set my TP at $21.50 but won’t set a stop loss, as I’ll be monitoring the bot closely. Now, let’s create the position and see how these bots perform.

Day 2 Update: Checking the Bot’s Performance

I’m back for day two, and it’s time to check on the bot’s performance. My Solana bot is down 2%, which isn’t too bad since I’ve only lost $21. I’ll look into the details in a moment. The Bitcoin bot is up $10, making up for roughly half of the losses from the Solana bot, with a 0.48% increase.

The bots I set before recording this show are performing really well, with the Worldcoin bot up 26.3% and the Curve bot up 7%. So, overall, we’re actually up, but the bots from yesterday are slightly down due to Solana. I want to dive into the data from the Solana bot to understand what’s happening.

Analyzing the Solana Bot’s Performance

We can see that we’re down 2.16%, but what’s interesting is what happened to the Solana price yesterday. It dumped slightly from our entry at $19.50, and since then, it hasn’t had any major bounces. Because these are grid bots, we’ve had a few buy orders taking place. If there’s no grid profit, it means the bot made a buy but hasn’t found a corresponding sell order to match that transaction.

We made a profit when it bought at $19.4 and sold at $19.5. We lose money when the price goes down but doesn’t bounce to the next grid, resulting in a small loss until the price recovers and matches with the next grid, allowing us to make a profit. I’m still comfortable sitting in this bot because we’re within the range, and as long as we chop within it, we should eventually get a bounce that enables us to realize some profit.

Bitcoin Bot’s Performance and Strategy

The Bitcoin bot is in profit because Bitcoin has had a couple of bounces on the lower timeframes. We made a $6 profit on one trade, buying Bitcoin at $25.99 and selling it for $26.15. The bots are performing well, but let’s focus on the Bitcoin bot. It’s now down $2 because Bitcoin has ripped to the upside, and there are a lot of sell orders that haven’t been filled.

These are essentially shorts that won’t be matched with their grids until we come back down. Bitcoin needs to pull back for us to profit on those grids. If we look into the detail section of the Bitcoin bot, our grid profit is $17.73, which is the realized profit on actual trades.

However, our floating P&L is down $90, meaning we have $19 worth of orders that haven’t been matched because Bitcoin hasn’t corrected yet. If Bitcoin starts to pull back, these matches will turn from floating P&L into grid profit.

Day 3 Update: Adjusting Strategies and Closing Positions

Salana has ticked into positive territory, slightly up from yesterday, thanks to a pump in price. Our Worldcoin long is up, but given the chart’s extremity and the potential for a breakout, I don’t want to risk it. I’ve decided to stop the bot and close all active positions. Let’s check in tomorrow to see how our bots are performing in light of a little more market volatility.

Day 4 Update: Final Results and Learnings

I just got home from the gym, and I was supposed to record the conclusion, but I started getting alerts on my phone that the market was pumping aggressively. I rushed to my computer, and as you can see, the Solana bot is now in $100 worth of profit.

The price of Solana pumped to the top of our range and then had a slight rejection, matching a lot of our buy orders with sells as the price increased. The Bitcoin bot is still slightly down, but overall, including the bots we already closed, we’re around $100 in profit after just a few days with a relatively small initial investment.

In 4 days, including the bots I opened before starting the challenge, I made $104, which equates to around $26 per day. If we exclude the bots I opened before recording live, we made $63 profit in 4 days, or about $16 a day, from a $3,000 bankroll. Percentage-wise, it’s a small gain, but I’m pretty happy with how this challenge went.

Conclusion and Future Plans

I learned a couple of key things from this experiment. First, these types of grid bots are most effective during sideways, volatile markets. If there’s a major dump and then a range forms, that’s the perfect time to set up a grid bot strategy. In really volatile, choppy markets, it becomes more difficult to execute grid bot strategies.

That’s where I might consider a more biased long or short strategy, which can utilize different automation. That’s something I’ll cover in next week’s video in this series, where I’ll focus primarily on short-term strategies. Today’s video was more of a medium to long-term strategy, as you can set and forget it as long as the price stays within the range. There’s a lot more to come in this series, as we’ll be experimenting with many more bots.

If you enjoyed this, make sure to smash the like button and let me know in the comments below which crypto products you’d like me to try next. If you want to trade on OKX, there’s a link in the description where you can get a mystery box valued at up to $10,000. I’ll see you in the next video. Have a lovely day, and peace out!