What’s a Grid Bot?
A Grid Bot is a significant addition to the 3Commas Bot family.
Grid Bots are perfectly suited to trading cryptocurrencies that are without trend, for example, cryptocurrencies that are not moving up or down with any clear direction. This is also known as ranging, moving sideways, or even “chop”.
Grid Bots are the easiest bots to create and use and are perfectly suited to beginners; both to bots in general and also Technical Analysis with charts.
If you choose your Grid Bot wisely, they can run for weeks, months, and possibly years, returning regular profits from the initial investment capital.
Profits are not reinvested and are instantly released to your exchange wallet as soon as they are generated.
Prerequisites: In order to use Grid Bots on 3commas, you can have any available subscription plan. Grid Bots support many exchanges, which you can check in this article.
Note: This guide does not cover creating Grid Bots with leverage, although may work with low leverage, eg: x2 or x3.
What Strategy does a Grid Bot use?
Bots need “strategies” or rules to tell them how to trade.
Grid Bots use a grid trading strategy that appears to have originated from the Forex markets. Essentially the strategy creates a series of buy and sell horizontal levels and the bot accumulates profit as price moves and “bounces around” within the grid.
How does the Grid Bot Strategy work?
The strategy is really very simple, you specify the upper and lower price limits of the grid and also the number of grid levels. Grid Bot will then work out the span of the grid by deducting the lower grid price level from the upper grid price level, it then divides this figure by the amount of grid levels specified, which becomes the grid width.
The Grid Bot will then create grid lines starting from the lower grid level and adds a new level, using the grid width, to space them out until it reaches the upper grid level.
Grid Bot options
Let’s explore the Grid Bot options and user interface.
First, let’s switch into ‘Paper Trading’ - there is no sense risking real funds when we can test without any risk!
Head to the Main menu, and click ‘GRID Bots’:
Choose the ‘Exchange’ account you wish to create this Grid Bot for, and also the ‘Market’ (this is the currency you will use to initially fund the bot with and receive profit in) and finally, the cryptocurrency ‘Pair’ you wish to trade
These are the controls where you can specify ‘AI’ or ‘Manual’ Grid Bot mode.
For ‘AI’ mode, the grid spacing and upper and lower levels are calculated automatically; you simply specify the amount of funds you wish to trade with. There are shortcut buttons that represent 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of available funds.
For ‘Manual’ mode, you can specify the upper and lower grid level limits and also the number of grid levels, which adjusts the grid spacing and profit per trade.The chart display allows you to preview the cryptocurrency coin pair chart, and also the grid levels suggested by the ‘AI’ mode or those that you manually configured.
You can adjust the time frame at the top left corner of the chart window.
Please note, no strategy is “fool-proof” and trading cryptocurrency pairs does involve risk.
Creating your first “AI” Grid Bot
Ok, now you are in the Paper Trading account, let’s create a simple Grid Bot with the “AI” mode to handle the settings for you!
Choose your currency pair, note that in the example, the chart time frame is set to '1 Day' (3) - we have BTC/USDT selected here, we will trade a USDT investment against BTC to create USDT profits.
Currency pair information display.
Chart time frame choice.
Visualization of grid levels using the currently chosen settings - “AI” mode handles all of this for you, you can see that BTC has been trading in a range for the last several days.
Grid Bot settings panel, “AI” strategy is selection, the ‘Amount; displays your funds available, click this to get it to refresh with your latest balance.
Choose the amount of funds you wish to invest in total for this bot.
Click “Create” to complete the bot configurations and create the bot, you’ll see a pop-up message stating: “Success!” - if there are any errors with the bot setting, you’ll get a message telling you what is wrong and what you’ll need to change.For a Grid Bot to work, it must start with both currencies. If you only hold USDT at this point, the Grid Bot will offer to purchase these coins now with a Market Order at current chart price. It will need BTC for each ‘sell’ grid level above current chart price. You can choose to accept this, or choose to buy these coins yourself with a Smart Trade and return to start the bot once the coins have been purchased or transferred to the exchange account if you hold them on a hardware wallet or other exchange account - this is what this message will look like:
Congratulations! You have created your first Grid Bot!
How does AI Strategy work?
We have improved our AI strategy to provide Grid bots with reliable conservative settings for selected trading pairs.
The AI will automatically set the upper and lower grid for selected trading pairs and fill the Grid bot with the maximum recommended orders within the range according to exchange account trading rules.
Please note that sometimes AI cannot suggest settings favorable for trading on selected pairs. Instead, the Grid bot will let you know. You can still trade these pairs in Manual Strategy mode at your own risk.
Grid Bot Management and Statistics
Fortunately, Grid Bots require little management when operating over a wide range, here is a breakdown of the Grid Bot progress indicator:
Pair being traded, click here to view a chart of the cryptocurrency used with this Grid Bot and indicators when trades were made - please note, some charts are not provided by the exchange so unfortunately aren’t visible (FTX.US and Binance.US, for example - you can log into the exchange to view the status and order history).
Current investment in bot, displayed for both currencies being traded.
GROSS Profit generated by the Grid Bot deal, this excludes exchange fees.
Grid Bot controls, Refresh the Grid Bot, Share a link to a friend to your settings, Stop (pause) the Grid Bot and delete the Grid Bot.
Status display selection, change between live view of current chart price or weekly/monthly views of previous trades.
Status display, shows current chart price and the neighbouring 2 buy and sell grid levels. The status of “wait” indicates the last “buy” level, a Grid Bot wouldn’t be any good if it kept buying and selling at the same price, so this is why it becomes “wait”.
Recent Grid Bot transaction log - this holds a limited history of recent trades.
Do Grid Bots work?
You be the judge! This Grid Bot was created in March 2020 and stopped when price left the top of the grid for the 3rd time towards the end of May 2020:
You may notice a dark red and green triangle on the candle body (1) - this indicates that a buy (green) or sell (red) trade occurred on this candle.
Also, below the candles at the bottom of the chart (2), you can see a (B) for Buy or (S) for a Sell.
As this bot is stopped, all the grid levels are set to “waiting”.
If you have any questions about Grid Bots, please check out our GRID Bots: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)!