If you have Telegram linked to your 3Commas account on the Settings page or you are reviewing your bot's Last Events (when you click the Bot's name on the 3Commas web interface), you may see this message from time to time:
"The bot was unable to close the deal as the price moved below the profitable area too fast. The trailing has been disabled and the deal reverted to the initial status, now it is waiting for trailing activation condition again."
When this happens, active Safety Orders are canceled as the bot was preparing to take profit, but due to a candle wick triggering the trailing take profit feature, the bot was unable to close the trade under these conditions (as the price fell back too fast) and if the bot executed a Market Order to close the trade, the closing price would be unpredictable and could possibly lead to loss, particularly if trading on futures exchanges.
If you experience this error message often, you can take action by implementing one (or a combination) of the suggestions below:
Analyze the coin charts that the bot is allowed to trade on, and pay particular attention to the 1 minute candle time frame; if the candles have gaps between them, no candle bodies or lots of wicks (also called "shadows") often bigger than the surrounding candle bodies then this coin is a poor choice to use with Trailing Take Profit; it is recommended to disable Trailing Take Profit on this bot. It may be a good idea to split your funds across two bots, one with Trailing Take Profit enabled and "hand-picked" coin pairs with liquid charts and not many wicks; the other bot can be configured without Trailing Take Profit enabled and used with other coin pairs with charts that have wicks, gaps or many candles without bodies.
Set "Max Active Safety Orders" to 1 in the bot settings, as if the Trailing Take Profit is triggered and then subsequently deactivated, this would only skip/cancel the 1 Safety Order already placed in the exchange order book; the remaining Safety Orders will be placed correctly if the Trailing Take Profit activates and then reverts back to the "waiting" status.
Any skipped/cancelled Safety Orders can be recreated using the Add Funds option using the button by the running bot deal that looks like: "+$ Add Funds" - this can often be advantageous as you can click the blue link to the bot deal's coin pair, and view the current chart and pick strategic levels to manually recreate the Safety Orders at strong levels of support on the chart.
How is the Trailing Take Profit activated?
We receive a live stream of asset prices from the exchange. Whenever there is a change in price, the bot automatically checks if the price has exceeded the trailing take profit level configured in the bot settings. If it has, and the trailing is about to be enabled, the bot sends a request to the exchange to double-check the price to make sure it's not a false signal to trigger the trailing (like a fast candle "wick"). It can take as little as 50 ms or as long as a couple of seconds - it depends on the load of the API connection with the exchange. During this validation, the price could move back away from the trailing level, so the bot will deactivate the trailing and wait for the price to move past the activation point again.
If the signal appears to be valid, the bot will enable trailing take profit and keep monitoring the price until it falls back to the trailing deviation percentage that is also set in the bot settings. This ensures that profits are locked in, and the trader can maximize their gains.
Trailing Take Profit is not recommended for illiquid markets, especially if you are trading with large order sizes, as slippage can occur when closing the deal with a Market Order. If you are trading large sums with your bot or trading in illiquid markets, it is recommended to disable Trailing Take Profit, as the bot will then place a Limit Order when the take profit target is hit.