One month ago I have launched my two free cryptocurrency trading bots on TradeSanta with around 0.04 BTC invested. Now I can share with you the first results I have received and frankly speaking they don’t look that promising.
One of the bots got stuck, the trading limit of the free plan was reached and the overall investment balance went down. This is the summary of my first testing. Keep reading this report to find out more details.
Insufficient balance problem
The story starts with an issue I faced right upon the launch of BTC-GNT bot with a Long strategy. After making an initial buy of 1908 GNT the bot stuck with an “insufficient balance” error while trying to execute another order to buy 1927 GNT.
I am still confused about why this happened because the total cost of these 2 deals was not exceeding 0.02 BTC bot limit and I had more than enough money on the balance to cover the deal. This error was there for half of the day, so I have decided to close this bot and re-launch it again. This time it started to work smoothly with no errors.
Comparing to BTC-POWR bot I have launched there is one difference in the behavior. This one bought some coins for the commission payments, so maybe this is the reason for the stopgap.
Monthly trading limit
The free plan of TradeSanta comes with a monthly trading limit of 3,000 USD. This was announced on the 22nd of April (and my experiment was started on 16th). Thanks to this unsuccessful timing I rave reached the limit right in the middle of the month.
To be exact, my two free bots worked 16 days before the trading limit of the free plan ($3000) was reached. What happened after? The bots and all open orders were stopped.
At this moment I had active sell or even better to say Take profit orders and the limit would not allow executing those even if the appropriate price would be reached. This sucks, as for the best performance the bots should work 24/7 with no pauses. To achieve this with the TradeSanta free plan you need to make sure that the limit of 3k per month will not be reached.
Here is the math that could help you to estimate the investing amounts if you decide to give the free plan a try. The balance that my two bots were using to trade was 0.04 BTC and with this investment, they were working for 16 days. The free plan of TradeSanta renews every month, so it means that if you want the bots to trade non-stop, the maximum total investment should not exceed 0.02 BTC or 0.01 BTC per one free bot.
Depending on the market conditions the bots can execute more or fewer orders, so this estimation is not 100% correct, but it certainly gives an understanding that you cannot use 2 bots on the free plan to trade with a solid deposit.
So is the free plan of TradeSanta useless? I would not say so. It is not designed for making any decent profit but might be a good solution for trading bot newcomers, who would like to test out the things at no cost.
My total balance: 0.1 BTC >>> 0.092 BTC
The most interesting part of this post is the analysis of the free TradeSanta bot performance. The first thing that I saw right after I entered the Dashboard was the balance information:
So the total balance went down from 0.1 BTC to ~0.092 BTC. Taking into account that only 0.04 BTC from the whole investment should be used for trading the reduction is quite huge. There is also a chance that due to the stuck bot issue I have bought more GNT coins that could never be sold.
From my previous experience, I know that it is not right to judge the performance of the trading bot based on 16 days of activity. The trading volume limit is one of the reasons for not getting the profit because the take profit orders are frozen until the next month.
What I like about TradeSanta is that they are giving representative graphs with all the balance movements and results listed. For example, here you can see how the total value of my portfolio was changed in BTC and USD.
You can see that the total BTC value was even more than 0.1 BTC one day, but then the Bitcoin has started to grow in price so the value of the bought altcoins went down. The algorithm of this bot is to buy low and sell high, so once the altcoins were bought and BTC started to grow there was no chance to sell the altcoins for a bigger price. These kinds of bots perform the best on flat markets, so the volatility happened last month played a dirty trick.
Here is another graph with the profit per day listed. As you can see the bot is not making a lot of deals, there can be even 3 days gaps with no profit. Last take profit orders were executed on the 1st of May and right after that, the trading limit has stopped all the activity.
What shall I do next?
I still want to make fair testing of Tradesanta and receive the results of a pure bot process with no limits and pauses. And I still want to achieve this on the free plan. So once the trading limit of 3k will be updated on my account I will launch 2 new bots with lower investments (0.02 BTC) not to reach the limit again.
Right now I have canceled these two bots and my Binance account looks this way:
Before starting a new experiment I will need to sell back all the altcoins for BTC or move them somewhere, just to see clear data.
Stay tuned for future updates. I still run my 3 best-performing bots on Bitsgap, so the next report would be probably related to their results.