Lists and review of different types, like top companies in crypto space.

Blockchain healthcare companies with native tokens – most promising projects to keep an eye on

Although Digitization is currently the smallest sector in DACS, it has some great use cases, including helping brands establish digital identity, accepting crypto payments directly, and allowing patients to digitize their medical records without a loss of privacy.

Smart contract platforms – most promising projects to keep an eye on

Books on market making

Top crypto market makers – a list and review

3Commas – A technical review

As we know, over the past several years, we have witnessed a real computer revolution. We have practically all available solutions replacing us with computers. These are already such advanced technologies that are already able to make a decision for us, and what’s more, they do it faster and more efficiently than man. It is particularly visible in trading, where several years ago all decisions were made by man. Now Traders are equipped in computer programs who are able to do all the work. However, the market is flooding with information on how many new programmes have been hiring by financial institutions recently. But what about us with retail traders? How should we deal with this situation? It remains for us either programming learning or uses trading bots (free/paid) from the Internet. There are really many of them when you looking for information on the web. That’s why I decided to check 3Commas in this short article. One of many users and additionally paid TradingBots. Let’s have a look at one of them – 3Commas. They were started in 2014, there are over 120,000 users currently being served with transaction volume in the tune of $60 million being handled every day, supported 23 exchanges- data from 3Commas website. You can trade on all exchanges from one single interface from 3commas’ window. Up to date, they support Bittrex, Bitfinex, Binance, KuCoin and Poloniex, Bitstamp, HitBTC, Cex, GDAX, OKEX, Huobi, YOBIT.

How well do 3commas trading bots work?

On the website, we can read that: “3commas is a cryptocurrency trading bot that provides a wide range of tools and services for users to choose from. It performs real-time market analysis using powerful algorithms for getting you the best trades possible”. Sounds interesting? Is this the right place to find a solution for retail traders? 3Commas offer a few types of trading bots: Simple, Composite, Short, Composite short. You can choose which one you want it depends on your individual approach to the market. At the moment available is almost 90 trading bots. Does quantity mean quality?       

Browsing information about bots, I wonder why the best strategies work only 30 days. How to trust this kind of bots with short history (just 30 days history)? How do I find out how it behaves with high market volatility? I don’t know. I couldn’t find this kind of information on the 3Commas website. For institutional investors or professional retail investors, this kind of question is fundamental. If you invest money you should know how much you can earn at what possibility of loss. That’s why it’s better for your wallet, to wait for a strategy with a long history to know what to expect.

Can I make a profit on real market with 3Commas?

Let’s see, how 3commas trading bots work. As a retail trader, I would like to try one of these 90 strategies. I choose for my example one “Simple Long Strategy” and I opened Paper Account. Pairs: USD_BTC, USDT_LINK, USD_LTC. Target profit 5%. On 3Commas website we can read the short description: “Simple Long Strategy gives you the possibility to make price increases”- information from 3Commas website. It looks simple to buy a lower price and sell higher price. The bot opens new deal according to one of the conditions that are available for selection during the creation. After that, it immediately puts a coin for sale. If the price rises and the order gets filled, the profit goal is achieved. In case of a price fall, the bot places safety orders below the purchase price every X%. Every filled safety order is averaging the buy price, and it makes possible to move the TakeProfit target lower and close the deal without losing profits in the first price bounce. 

My strategy has been worked for 14 days. Completed 15 orders and give me $0.16 profit ($10.000 balance). Strategy performance results and statistics below.  

3comma trading list

3comma statistics technical review

3 comma trading view technical review

Whether the profit is big or small I leave the answer to you. The rate of return is positive (+0,16$), therefore we should be satisfied (really  ?). My “New Bot” did not lose money. Of course, everything was happening on the real market but money was virtual. You should also know that is possible to change strategies parameters at any time and can adapt it to your current needs but I did not do that because left my 100% decisions to the bot. 

The main purpose of trading bots is to automate things which are either too complex, time-consuming, or difficult for users to carry out manually. Good trading bots can save a trader time and money by collecting data faster, placing orders faster and calculating next moves faster. In my case, I just set the parameters and Trading Bot did the rest but is it enough to tell that the strategy is good? Please rate it yourself.  Meanwhile on the market situation looks very interesting for my example (charts below). The market moved up, how I expected. As you can see from the charts below I could earn more money in this period of time. 

3comma trading review

3comma tradingview

You also need to know that 3Commas is not for free. They have four subscription plans: Junior from €0 (your total balance across all accounts is $750 and no bots), Starter €24 (without limits for trading, no bots), Advanced €41 (Simple bots), Pro €84 (Simple, Composite Bots). The interesting thing is that you don’t know how much you can earn but you immediately know how much you have to pay!! Profits are potential but costs are fixed.

How safe is 3Commas?

3Commas don’t go into too many details regarding the security protocols that they choose to employ, however, it’s worth remembering that you don’t actually hold any funds on the platform and your trading bots are not able to make withdrawals from your linked accounts.

Similar to other trading bot platforms, your trading bots connect with your exchange accounts via API and then proceed to carry out automated trades on your linked exchanges. While this process takes place, users aren’t required to make any cash/crypto transfers to external accounts and simply need to provide their API keys which are generated by their exchanges.

These keys provide the trading bots with restricted access to user accounts strictly to conduct trades and do not grant the bots with any withdrawal rights. This also means that if your account becomes compromised, and some hackers were able to gain control of your trading activity, they still wouldn’t be able to directly access your exchange accounts in order to make withdrawals. However, the standard personal security rules of crypto still apply, as they could still have a detrimental effect on the funds held in your exchange accounts. Hackers have been known to obtain API access to exchange accounts, and commander the bots to purchase high quantities of low-value coins that the hackers have already previously purchased. After artificially inflating both the demand and price of said coins, the hackers then sell off their personal holdings for a profit, leaving the compromised account owners holding funds in the low-value coins.

3Commas has made a positive impression. It is also worth mentioning about Key Features:

  1. Technology – Automated trading takes place via API integration with cryptocurrency exchanges and the bot works around the clock with any device and users can access their trading dashboard on desktop and laptop computers. The team have also developed mobile apps for both Android and iOS
  2. Tools – The platform provides a good range of trading tools and in addition to the automated bots and performance analytics, users are able to create, analyze and back-test crypto portfolios and monitor the best performing portfolios created by other users. In addition, users can engage in social trading and follow and copy the actions of other successful traders.
  3. Functionality- 3Commas utilises a web-based platform, and features an easy to use and intuitive user interface that includes a wide range of functions and detailed analytics. Users can make use of short, simple, composite, and composite short bots, and set stop loss and take profit targets, as well as customise their own trading strategies.

Strong points of 3 Commas Bot Platform

  1. Emotionless, fact-based trades make sure that decisions taken are taken entirely based on the ideal conditions with little room for doubt, instinct, and human error. This reduces the intensity of the decision-making process and helps to take logical and high-profit decisions.
  2. Good exchange connections.
  3. The Smart Trading option that makes use of ‘trailing take profit’ keeps the user away from a loss when trading. Since it is designed to stay in the loop and adapt itself to the market, it is an intelligent solution to make as much as possible with a trade.
  4. Easy to set up for beginners, making sure that newcomers can navigate the 3Commas bot and make trades without any hassles.
  5. A well-laid-out dashboard and visualization of data allow the users to keep track of everything that is happening while boosting their appeal and ease of use.
  6. The free access offers a great trial so that users can make full use of the platform.
  7. A large number of exchange offers a wide array of information centres, making sure that your decision is well thought out with multiple inputs.
  8. The fact that users can refer and copy portfolios of successful traders.

Weak points of 3 Commas Bot Platform

  1. Security protocols are not explained with great clarity, raising concerns about whether the trades are truly secure. Users can, of course, enable the 2-factor verification for additional security, but the fact that not much is said about it leaves room for concern.
  2. The plans change regularly and might prove to be a bit confusing to say the least with 3Comms’ paid plans, commission plans, and a mix of both.
  3. The balance has to be filled up for commission, which may be a hindrance for many users.

Using trading bots for trading makes life easier. It can save traders a lot of time but will give it earn real money? Popular trading bots available to individual investors (regardless of whether paid or free) have one basic problem, namely the speed of response to changing market conditions, as well as the speed of placing and sending orders. This is not their strength. You will not find any information about latency, what is the maximum number of orders that can be sent  per second. Using low latancy software will give you advantage on the market over retail bot users. Therefore, institutional investors have an edge on the market.

But retail bots are good place to start education on how automation on the markets can work. 

Read reviews on follwing bot platforms:

Cryptohopper – Technical Review 2019

There is quite a hot market for cryptocurrency trading platforms and algorithmic trading bots. New crypto traders and active traders from capital markets are pouring in funds into algorithmic strategies and bots to make the most out of the constant opportunistic cryptocurrency fluctuation. On the other hand trading platform, providers and investment bots are tailoring their strategies to be tuned well to different scenarios depending on the type of events occurring within the market.
Due to the expansion of development from these trading bots and their adaptability to different events, the process of choosing one has become quite challenging, even for those with technical and trading background, hence at Empirica, we decided to bring knowledge about professional crypto trading bots to interested readers and traders and our selected bot for this article is Cryptohopper.

In this review, we will cover relative features included in Cryptohopper trading platform. We analyze ways that traders can utilize Cryptohopper for their trades. We also take a look at their tool from a technical point of view (our team at Empirica has been focused on the institutional algorithmic trading platform and market making algorithms for almost 10 years). Later in the review, we will also take a look at options we believe Cryptohopper lacks. But first and foremost:

What is Cryptohopper?

Cryptohopper is an retail algorithmic trading platform with a series of configurable trading features (more on professional algorithmic trading platform). Cryptohopper’s platform is shaped around 5 key elements, which each have been developed further to meet the needs of traders. The 5 key elements are:

  • Mirror trading
    This feature allows investors to copy the trades of experienced and successful forex investors. Strategies are available through a marketplace, some free and some paid.
  • Paper trading
    A simulated trading practice to assess trading algorithms with real and live data.
  • Strategy designer
    A technical indicator assembler which lets traders design their strategies using the listed indicators. There are currently somewhere around 130 technical indicators provided by Cryptohopper.
  • Algorithmic trading
    An automated way of executing trading algorithms with a specified set of configuration.
  • Trailing stop
    It’s a feature designed to stop strategies to operate if a defined trigger has been pulled.

Which exchanges are supported by Cryptohopper?

There are in total of 10 exchanges that are supported by Cryptohopper. Exchanges are KuCoin, Bitvavo, Binance, Coinbase pro, Bitterex, Poloniex, Kraken, Huobi, Bitfinex and Binance.US. 

How can I trade with Cryptohopper?

Depending on your sophistication level and trading knowledge, Traders can utilize Cryptohopper platform to their use. There are two bots, the market-making and Arbitrage bots and there are also strategies that can be used to select a set of indicators to form a strategy.

Market Making Bot

The market making bot is designed for retail investors (check market making bot for professional users). It is designed to perform liquidity provision to the market of traders’ choice. The market making bot is a configurable algorithm that executes buy and/or sell (take and/or make) by placing a layered limit of buy and sell orders. 

To initiate using the market making bot, traders must go through the preliminary configurations. Starts with choosing an exchange and setting up the API keys. Even using the API the fund still will be located in the exchange and in order to trade on the exchange, traders need to generate an API key and then connect that to their Cryptohopper account. 

After the initial configuration, there is also a set of more advanced Market Making configuration. Market and Pricing is the second stage of Market Making setup at Cryptohopper. This stage includes configuration of the market and which pair trader is interested in. Then moving on to the strategy setup with market trends. Market trends are either uptrend, downtrend or it could stay as neutral. Additionally, the order sequence of buying and selling with a given sequence, the order layer which represents the tiered buy and sell orders that are going to be placed and the moving on to the amount constraints within layers (e.g. buy amount, higher ask and percentage lower bid).

Cryptohopper Trading Bot Review

The Cryptohopper Market Making bot is also equipped with an “Auto-cancel” functionality which based on the configuration determines when to open and close positions. There is also a time limit to trigger the cancel on the bot. Seemingly the most important feature of the Auto Cancel is the Cancel on the trend, which enables auto cancelling on the bot when the marker changes to a direction e.g. from neutral to a downtrend or from neutral to uptrend and etc. Cancellation on the bot could also be triggered with percentage change, this only happens if the market has a certain specified percentage change or within a given period. The auto-cancel feature also works with the depth limit, which Traders can set from a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 500. Additionally, Traders that are interested in Cryptohopper Market Making bot can set their “Stop-loss” settings. Stop-loss can be triggered in the event of a turn in the market. 

Cryptohopper market making bot also provides a revert and backlog feature, where it can move all the failed orders to the Traders’ backlog. Traders can also revert all their cancelled orders from the backlog if Traders decide to revert back a failed market maker orders and re-execute the orders. There are many more settings on reverting back orders that can be automated with configuration, to name of the settings, only revert if it will lead to a profit, or revert/not revert with market trends such as neutral trend, downtrend or uptrend.

In order to slow down the market making bot, Cryptohopper introduced the cool down feature, which the bots cooldowns by removing the order after a certain time has passed.

Cryptohopper has designed a dashboard with some widgets for Traders to monitor the market making bot in action. There is a trading view widget which is a visual representation of the current prices.

Cryptohopper Trading Bot Review

Among other widgets available on the Cryptohopper dashboard, there is the order book visualizations with the possibility of manual Market Making which enables buying and selling to be connected to each other and will input that order into the Market Making bot logs.

Cryptohoppe also has created an inventory for all failed trades to be stored in a place called backlog. In order for Traders to be able to use the Cryptohopper Market Making bot they need to be subscribed to the “hero hopper Pro” package, which costs a monthly subscription fee of 99$.

The Arbitrage bot:

The Arbitrage bot of Cryptohopper is designed to capitalize from changes across different markets. The bot allows to trade discrepancies in the market, taking advantage in market price between the same pairs on different exchanges.

Just like the market making bot, the Arbitrage bot also requires a pre-setup procedure to get going with the bot. The procedure starts with setting up the maximum open time of all buy orders, which determined the number of minutes a buy order remains open before the order is cancelled. Following that, there is the maximum open time of all sell orders which does the same thing but for all sell orders.

The setting up procedure then takes traders to exchange setting, where traders should specify two exchanges that would like to perform their arbitrage. Afterwards, they will set the percentage sell amount, which it should use to create the amounts which are being traded and then the Arbitrage amount per market which how much of trade at a time should take place.

In case interested trader would like to utilize exchange specific configuration, they can set minimum profit that they would like arbitrage with. Additionally, there are options to have the maximum open time of the Arbitrage. Traders are also given the possibility to simultaneous arbitrages which determine the maximum number of simultaneous or concurrent arbitrages. Furthermore, they set rate on buy and sells which specify the amount the Arbitrage should check. 

The Arbitrage dashboard also includes a backlog where all failed trades will be stored. The dashboard also has the latest Arbitrage trades that were both successful and failed. There are also other widgets inside the Arbitrage dashboard, e.g. exchange arbitrage dashboard results, the last five trades and market Arbitrage results.

Strategies:

Traders using Cryptohopper platform could create a trading strategy with a collection of indicators they have selected. These are the indicators to buy and sell trades. Cryptohopper has created a strategy designer feature where traders create and custom their strategies. There are three ways trades can utilize a strategy. First is to use Market Strategies, these are strategies bought on the Marketplace (we cover features of Marketplace later in this article). Strategies bought from Marketplace which could also be automatically be updated every time the seller of the strategy makes changes on the strategy. Second is built-in strategies, Cyrptohopper offers a set of built-in strategies that are offered free of charge. These are rather basic strategies such as uptrend strategies, buy the dip strategies, Bollinger strategies and etc. Third and last is My strategies, these are custom made strategies that traders built.

Strategy designer:

Strategy designer is a place where traders can personalize their technical analysis setting. There are given a set of indicators where traders can find and configure a wide selection of trading indicators. Traders on cryptohopper can decide on the chart period, buy and sell signals and candle period when selecting an indicator. With candle patterns, traders can directly respond to price movements from the chart data of an exchange. 

Furthermore, traders can design their strategies by adding a JSON code, this section is designed for more technical and programmer traders. These traders could also modify existing strategies. Once strategies are configured and up and running, Cryptohopper strategy dashboard allows traders to monitor their strategies. 

Cryptohopper Marketplace:

The marketplace is a section within the strategy creation process. This unit is designed solely for social and mirror trading. This is where traders with a usually lower level of experience and knowledge in trading can browse already created strategies and use it for their funds to invest with.

There is a set of strategies and templates available in the marketplace. Each template and strategy has a corresponding base-currency and exchange. Therefore templates can be chosen based on traders preferences. Additionally, all templates have information about their ratings, total downloads, modifications and recentness. 

The marketplace also consists of Signalers. All signals in the marketplace correspond to an exchange. A trader can configure their trading using only signals. The Signal configuration could limit orders. The setting also allows traders to take profit with a given percentage set.

Strategy statistics:

Cryptohopper provides traders with a set of statistics in order for traders to be able to monitor the performance of their strategies and trades. There is a variety of ways provided in the statistics dashboard to see how trades and strategies are performing. 

The time period for all buy and sell order, allocation of funds based on currency, open positions and base currency reserved. Traders can view their profit stats basing on currency invested on, base currency returns, the base currency gained/lost in current positions and trading fees paid. 

Profit based on sell triggers is another statistic available for traders to monitor profit related to percentage profit, trailing stop loss and auto close within time. Traders can also view profits based on buy triggers that we generated by strategies, signalers, trailing stop buy.

Cryptohopper Academy

For traders who would like to be familiar with Cryptohopper as a trading platform, there is a tutorial-like instruction supported by Cryptohopper itself and other instructors can also use this academy portal to provide education knowledge to interested traders.

Our take:

Cryptohopper has done a decent job working out a tool that traders would feel comfortable doing their trades. We really liked the interface and how they have designed a user journey that would fit a different type of traders with different level of expertise. The wording in the platform is well explanatory and hints around important features. Though, as a solution provider for professional crypto market makers, we believe the assessment of market trends are done manually by users and very sensitive to human error. The market making bot has a low ability to manage more market at once and needs of content human supervision.

Check our take on how trading bots for professional crypocurrency traders are build and designed.

Read reviews on follwing bot platforms:

Different types of Cryptocurrency