A few days ago I started running two separate grid bots on 3commas to see if they were worth the hype. I had been contemplating testing this a while ago but never got around to it. Seems perhaps I was missing out!

What triggered the urge to run the test was a few things I picked up in the The Better Traders Account Builders course. I’ll do a review of the course in another post, but note the course didn’t teach anything about using grid bots. What they did talk about in detail was channel trading as a means of building a small account quickly, and how to identify a good coin chart to use for channel trading.

However, grid bots tend to use the same style chart pattern, so I thought why not – let’s see if the grid bot could work as a channel trading substitute. In all honesty, I think a manual channel trading technique would have made WAY more returns than the grid bot. Maybe I’ll do a post on that later, ie. comparing the two. But my style here at the onepercent blog is to automate trades as much as possible.

The coins I ended up with were RVN with a USDT base, and ANKR with a BNB base. I chose RVN as I already had some from a previous bot trade that went sideways, so it fit the channel trading profile pretty darn close. I then chose ANKR specifically off the heels of the Account Builders course where they introduced the Poobah One scanner and how to use it. It didn’t take long to find it either since I knew what to look for. Before taking the Account Builders course, the scanner was pretty much gibberish to me.

Grid Bot Setup

I won’t go into too much detail here on how I setup the bots or chose the grid lines, though most of it was based on trying to get as many coins per grid separation as my wallet would allow. I was also aiming for about 1% between grid lines. While this would mean a lower profit per trade, but more trades. I had enough RVN to get close to a 1% grid, but only enough ANKR for a 3 to 4% grid. You’ll see in the results below RVN came out on top, but this doesn’t mean a tighter grid pays better. I would need two separate but mostly identical bots using the same coins with the grid spacing as the only variable to prove it. Maybe some day I’ll try that out.

Grid Bot Results

In any case, here’s the final result of the USDT_RVN grid bot:

So over a period of four days the USDT_RVN grid bot squeezed out almost 50 trades for a total return of 4.58% (not including trading fees – about 0.2%). Not too shabby eh! That’s more than one percent per day 🙂

Here’s what the trades looked like on the Trading View chart:

And here’s the final result of the BNB_ANKR grid bot:

Over the same four days the BNB_ANKR bot gave a total of 2.8% over eight trades. Not quite one percent per day, but not too bad either.

Here’s the Trading View chart for BNB_ANKR:

I ended stopping the bots for a couple of reasons. First, you’ll see in both the Trading View charts above at the very end the price exceeded my upper price limit for the bots, so I didn’t have any more coins to sell. I could either wait for it to drop back down (but that would mean an idle bot, and idle bots don’t make money), or adjust my grid lines to suit the new trading limits. However, as learned in the Account Builders course, this is not a good move. Since the coin has moved out of the channel, then it becomes less predictable and reliable – so time to move on.

The second reason I stopped the grid bots was to move the funds into another long bot I was running (more on this a future post). The long bot is making more than one percent per day (at the moment), so it made sense to take the coins from the grid bots and put them there.

Final Thoughts on 3commas Grid Bots

For me the grid bots make sense since I’m lazy and like automation, as long as you can find the right chart/coin to play. However, if you are in account building mode I wouldn’t recommend using grid bots, the returns just aren’t there. The reason is simple… dollar cost averaging. Let’s say the coin is trading at the bottom of the channel (your lower price limit) and starts a run all the way up to the top over a few days. At every grid line the bot will sell some and take profit. So you’re splitting (and therefore averaging) your profits all the way up, instead of waiting for it to hit the upper limit to sell. So you end up making an average profit. The same applies for when the coin is moving down, you keep buying all the way down, so your average buy price will always be higher than the lowest price you could have paid.

To further illustrate the point, the grid lines on my USDT_RVN chart are about 13% apart. So by manually buying and selling at the right times just once during the four days, you could have made 13%, instead of the 4.58% the bot made.

That’s my 0.00000225 BTC (at the time of writing 😉 on grid bots.