5 Best Crypto Trading Platforms That Help Investors (Updated 2021)
Trading directly on cryptocurrency exchanges can be cumbersome and difficult. Navigating from exchange to exchange to find the best pricing, manually place every trade, and monitoring countless positions is a constant problem for traders.
Most crypto traders have turned towards trading platforms to help solve these problems. Not only can trading platforms help simplify your trading experience, but they can help you take advantage of opportunities that were not previously available to you as a trader.
The rest of this article will cover the top 5 trading platforms that are highly recommended for traders.
Shrimpy
Shrimpy serves different purposes for different people. Due to the diverse set of features offered by the platform, investors are able to implement a strategy that works the best for their own portfolio.
Terminal / Order Management System
Executing a day trading strategy is easy for investors by using the trading terminal inside Shrimpy. This trading terminal offers support for both limit orders and smart market orders.
Rather than blindly executing market orders, Shrimpy uses a custom market order system that carefully monitors the market and executes trades to reduce slippage, improve trade placement, and prevent excessive losses.
Social Trading
If you're new to trading or want to try something unique, social trading might be the option for you. Social trading allows investors to copy the portfolios and strategies from leaders. Rather than implementing your own strategy, followers in the social trading program can leverage the expertise of more experienced traders.
Social trading is a great way to learn about different strategies, gain experience in understanding the market, and getting knowledge from expert traders.
Portfolio Automation
The cryptocurrency market is 24/7. That means staying up to date with the market can get exhausting. Rather than trying to beat the bots, you can join them by utilizing the professional portfolio automation options that are available in Shrimpy.
Unlike other trading platforms, Shrimpy only focuses on the most prominent and trusted strategies. They can help you automate rebalancing, dollar-cost averaging, and portfolio stop-losses. Each of these strategies have stood the test of time.
Trading like an institution or professional investor has never been easier than with Shrimpy.
Strategy Backtesting
Before allocating a portfolio, you can also test your strategies in the backtesting suite. It’s the perfect way to understand how different automation settings impact performance over the long-term.
Is it better to allocate a diverse portfolio or a few high cap assets?
These are the types of questions that the strategy backtesting features can help you answer.
Also, read our Shrimpy review.
Gekko
Gekko is an open-source trading project that can be used to aggregate live market data, calculate indicators, and simulate order execution.
Due to the nature of the service, it’s nearly required to have a highly technical understanding of trading, programming, and exchanges in order to utilize this trading resource.
Strategies
Gekko is designed to allow programmers to implement their own trading strategies through custom technical analysis indicators.
These TA indicators can run on your local system to analyze the market in real-time and execute trades.
Unfortunately, since Gekko is not a hosted solution, that means you will need to run your computer 24/7 in order to take full advantage of this trading solution.
Backtesting
Once a strategy has been implemented in Gekko, it can be backtested using the paper trader that is provided in the same repository.
With the cost of exact order book data, the backtests primarily utilize OHLCV candlestick data which can be widely inaccurate. For that reason, it’s generally recommended to take the backtested results with a grain of salt.
Plugins
Gekko supports a variety of plugins that can be used to update you through IRC, Telegram, email, and many other platforms.
With little effort, developers can also add additional plugins to Gekko to access new integrations that aren’t currently available out-of-the-box.
Zenbot
Zenbot is similar to Gekko in many ways. It primarily lives as an open-source trading bot that can be accessed by developers to program their own trading strategies.
Much like Gekko, this solution is complicated to use and difficult to maintain. We would only recommend Zenbot for highly technical traders who are willing to spend the time developing trading strategies, programming a solution, and managing bugs that come with the platform.
Strategies
Zenbot provides a few select strategies out-of-the-box that can be configured. These strategies include sell stops, buy stops, and trailing profit stops.
Although these are a good start, the vast majority of strategies will need to be implemented manually. Zenbot is a fully technical-analysis-based trading platform.
That means Zenbot users will need to design technical indicators, implement the strategy, and then automate the strategy through custom code.
Backtesting Simulator
Historical data can be used to backtest trading strategies that you develop. While this is useful, much like Gekko, Zenbot will primarily look at OHLCV data which will be inaccurate.
In addition to the backtesting simulator, Zenbot also supports a paper trading feature that allows developers to simulate trading on live market data. This is ideal for testing new strategies on real market data.
Plugins
Zenbot supports a convenient plugin architecture for implementing new strategies, integrating exchanges, and communicating with 3rd party services.
In the native solution, Zenbot supports Binance, Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Bittrex, CEX.IO, Coinbase Pro, and several other major exchanges.
Hummingbot
Hummingbot is an open-source software package designed for institutions that are building customized trading strategies.
Trading is available on both centralized exchanges and decentralized protocols to provide broad liquidity access.
Strategies
Hummingbot is best known for its pre-built market-making templates. These templates have been used by institutions and exchanges to provide extra liquidity to markets.
In addition to the market-making templates, Hummingbot also supports templates for arbitrage trading, cross-exchange market making, and CELO arbitrage.
Each of these strategies is designed for different use cases that target institutions. Rather than implementing strategies for traders or professional investors, Hummingbot is primarily servicing the institutional market.
Connectors
Hummingbot provides functionality for implementing your own connectors. These connectors can be used to execute trades on exchanges that are not currently supported by Hummingbot.
Each connector will require an intimate understanding of the exchange or protocol that is being integrated. Generally, this is primarily recommended as an option for institutions or professional development teams.
Integrations
Telegram can be integrated into Hummingbot flows by using native functionality. Unfortunately, beyond Telegram, the number of additional integrations is few and far between.
Cryptoblizz
CryptoBlizz is a trading bot for traders that are looking to configure and develop custom trading strategies.
Without any programming, traders can implement unique trading strategies that take advantage of signals, indicators, and other conditions.
Strategies
CryptoBlizz primarily focuses on custom strategies that are designed by the customer. Rather than providing strategies out-of-the-box, customers are required to implement these advanced strategies themselves.
Each strategy can be implemented through a series of actions that can buy, sell, stop-loss, or take-profit for a strategy.
Although programming is not required, most traders will still find that strategy building takes a significant amount of time and energy with CryptoBlizz.
Backtesting
No platform would be complete without some types of backtesting tools. In CryptoBlizz, they offer a strategy backtesting suite that runs on 1-minute candlestick data.
Similar to what was previously discussed, unfortunately, candlestick data is imprecise and leads to incorrect results. So, we recommend taking these results with a grain of salt.
In addition to the backtesting features, we can also find paper trading functionality in the platform which allows traders to simulate a strategy on live data.
Conclusions
Each of these trading platforms is designed for different purposes. If you are looking for a convenient resource to manage your portfolio and automate trading, then look no further than Shrimpy. You will be happy with the simplicity and powerful tools they offer.
On the other hand, if you are looking to build your own crypto trading strategy from scratch and want to program everything on your own. Then Gekko or Zenbot would be more ideal for your use case. These two tools will give you the flexibility to build your own solution that works for you, but it will be a long journey due to the heavy development requirements.
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