Crypto signals were a scam. Any possible profits could be made only by ourselves. How I made my first bot.
Crypto signals groups were all scam. Group leaders were publishing complicated technical charts showing theirs “expertise”, speculate about insiders, whales, whatever else. “Blockchain Whispers”, “Bitmex Whales”, private traders were trying to make money on selling signals to us.
There were even cypto signals aggregators, these groups were buying membership and then “pirate” signals forwarding them to theirs own group. One of these aggregators was recently closed and admin wrote an honest letter, saying that he doesn’t want his subscribers suffer more losses. That’s what he wrote:
“Over the last year or so, we have tenaciously tried many signal groups, sources and many approaches with the goal of getting you an edge in crypto trading. I believe having the access and reach we had over these last couple of years gave us a great edge. Some of us could even capitalize on this edge.. but what we have seen more and more over the last year, coming at it from as many angles as we could, with access to all the vast information and sources we had, is that fundamentally, signal groups are not profitable. In fact, they are becoming more and more polluted with misinformation and ‘scammy’ behaviour by the day.
Based on this sure clarity, I would no longer be involved in promoting these groups or stand by and listen to the vast majority of our members beating themselves up over losses in trading.”
Nevertheless, group members paid for everything in the end.
The conclusion is that nobody will give us money, we can only take it by ourselves with the knowledge, research and disciplined trading (obvious, right? no, not for all). Nobody will give us profitable signals, we can make it only by ourselves.
That was my motivation when I’ve started to study to scripting languages, trading algos, liquidity, execution, exchanges etc., to write my own bot/strategy, to produce signals by myself.
What I’ve understood after building my own crypto bot and few months of automatic trading:
- With the strategy that is open for you to study and alter, you can see how it works and why it makes this or that decision. You can change the system. You can adjust it for some specific asset.
- You can see how it works in the long run (backtests) and tune it up.
- You got signal at the same time as everybody else, there is no “inner circle” that buys first and dumping on you after.
- The algos removes all the behavioral biases you have. Most profitable trades seems counterintuitive at first, but great in hindsight.
- Also automatic system has bullet proof risk management, once it was built in, it will follow it rigorously (it is hugely important specifically in long losing strikes).
That is for positive sides. As for negative sides, they are the same as for manual trading and more:
- If 95% of active traders fail to beat a low-cost index fund, then probably the same thing for active algo strategies.
- It is not exactly ’set it and forget it’ type of operation. It’s about deploying different bots for different market conditions and being comfortable making adjustments. @peasantwizard
- Typically, the most profitable strategies are kept in secret.
- Bot needs to be online, deal with different exchange API’s, etc.
- There are lots of fraudsters that sells “profitable bots” and strategies with unrealistic back-testing results that hard to achieve in real trading.
What I’ve found that in 2020 we have great developed open source places for algotrading that easily connects like LEGO bricks.
- TradingView has a huge open source community and great developers that opens some of theirs strategies free of charge that is easy to use and change.
- QuantStart community for advanced guys.
- There is a list of execution software, like open source Instabot trader , and its commercial version Alertatron, 3commas, more expensive ones like HaasBot etc that turns the execution on exchange from constant headache to not-so-expensive service problem.
- Not perfect, but reliable, high-liquidity exchanges with negative commission — Bitmex and Bybit. Negative commission is crucial for most algotraders profitability.
There are great support telegram groups such as PineScripters with ultra-helpful admins and coders to help people with peculiarities of Tradingview’s Pine programming.
But I found nothing where one can ask some beginners questions about simple adding strategy to the chart, tuning, testing, getting real strategy’s results or about simple the way to execute on exchange. For some beginners question how to get into algotrading without … years of coding experience.
So I’ve decided to start a telegram channel and discussion group to help everybody find profitable TradingView open source strategies and to set up their bots. To help to avoid buying some commercial strategies that does not work in reality. To see the difference in execution SAAS. To learn from each other. Without scam, shilling, and commercial background.
I plan to write some complete beginners step-by-step bot building guide using open source strategy on TradingView and then to test more strategies and publish actual trading results in the channel.
TLDR; To avoid scams in crypto, we should learn how to profit by ourselves. Let’s research new trading algos together.
I invite everybody to join the community to write and discuss algotrading here: https://t.me/myowncryptobots
