There’ll be times when your 3Commas trading bots will start a deal and the coin drops beyond what you’ve allowed for in safety orders. Here’s how to recover those deals and still make a profit on the deal.

I generally only let my bots trade down to a 5% loss, so no safety orders after that. I find that coins that drop more than this don’t recover quickly enough to be worth chasing the coin down. Plus, I would need to have a considerable amount of cash sitting in reserve doing nothing waiting for those coins to come back. Instead, I let the coin run its course, then manually average my bought cost down to where the bot can take the profit on a smaller rise. Here’s an example.

Both XTZ and XRP are down 4.47% and 8.64% respectively after exhausting all safety orders, and have been around for a couple of weeks now (I prefer deals to end in a couple hours, not weeks!). This happens, so we just need to deal with it! Putting in a stop loss would have cashed in our loss, so i don’t use those. So, how do we recover these?

To recover the trades we need to average our purchase price down as much as possible, so we’re going to add funds to the deals to do that. If you’re like me though, you don’t have much in the way of extra funds, so it’s beneficial to do only one recovery at a time. The more you can put into a single deal, the faster it will close. The next question is, which deal to try and end first?

This is a bit of a “feeling” usually from looking at the charts. If we look at the XTZ chart, you’ll see the trading range from the last few days is quite narrow.

If we tried to bring our average buy price down on this chart, we would need a huge amount compared to our current position to get an average cost even close to the trading range to try and close it with a profit.

For XRP, unfortunately it doesn’t look much better!

So which one to choose? Here’s another clue. I have about $546 USDT available to add, and have about $247 in XTZ, and $183 in XRP. By investing in XRP, we’re about a 3 to 1 ratio, vs 2.2 to 1 for XTZ. Going with XRP in this case gives us more bang for our buck since we’d be buying a lot more XRP than we already have. Remember, we’re trying to bring our average down, so the more we can buy at a lower price compared to what we’ve already paid is better. Going for XTZ would only bring the average buy price down by about 2/3 of where we need to be. With WRP, we’ll be closer to about 3/4 of the way down.

However, I’m still not convinced. The XTZ chart looks like the coin is on a better bull run compared to XRP, doing about a 4% increase in the last two days…

….vs XRP at about 1.6% increase in the same period (more or less).

So, better buy average vs a possible bull run? Which way to go? Usually the choice is clearer, but not with these two.

Let’s go with XTZ – for two reasons, one coin is not as deep in the hole as XRP, and it has the better looking chart. Now, let’s make it happen.

Add Funds to the Deal

First, bring up the chart again and zoom in so we can determine the best buy price.

In this screenshot it’s current price is 2.6907 and rising.

Close the chart and click on Add Funds.

Now, the price is taking a small run up, so I’m going to pull back on the buy price in anticipation of it coming down. I’m going to use 2.6850. It doesn’t always work, so don’t get too cheeky with trying to time the market.

In the Add Funds window, crank up the Volume to the max, or whatever you want to add. The more the better, and the faster the deal will close. Now switch the price to Limit, and put in your buy price of 2.685, and then click on Save.

Here you can see how much of the order has been filled. In this case none, since the market price is 2.6893 and our buy price is 2.685. So we wait.

And wait. And wait. Hopefully not too long. We want quick trades, remember!

Ah! There it is. Order filled, and our % down looks a lot better! Only 1.71% compared to the previous ~3.7%.

Now we wait some more. We wait for the coin to fluctuate and hopefully it rises enough to hit our profit target and close the deal at a profit.

If it’s taking too long, you have a couple of options:

• Add more funds to bring your average buy price down even more, or:
• Close the deal and take a loss.

The first is self explanatory, but taking a loss?

Yes, it’s necessary sometimes.

You’ll need to weigh the total loss against the lost opportunity of having your bot actively trading and closing deals. For example, if you’re looking at possibly waiting two or three days for the bot to recover and make a total profit of $2 or sell and take a loss of say $5, but your bot consistently makes you $4 per day when running, then you’re potentially losing. You could make 3 days times $4 = $12, and subtract your $5 loss for a net gain of $7.

You need to make that assessment for yourself and decide if it’s worth it.

Rinse and Repeat

If you’ve got more than one deal in the toilet, then simply repeat the process until you’ve rescued them all. Go one at a time as this gives you the maximum leverage from your available funds to get a low as possible average price. The lower you can get the average buy price, the faster your deals will close.