My experience with running a bot

So I recently watched a Max Maher video about a few kinds of bots that you can run in a bid to replace active trading. There are obvious advantages to this like removing emotions, catching movement when you are not looking at charts example when you are asleep. Further, slightly complex bots can DCA in when prices go down and DCA out when prices go up and so on.

So I tried running a Spot Futures Arbitrage Bot. As he explains in the video, if you put 100$ into the bot, it opens a long spot position of 50$ and a short 50$ futures position (I’ll mention leverage in a sec). Now whichever way the market moves, you aren’t really losing or gaining money. However, due to its leveraged and “bet” on the future, the price of the futures will be different from the spot price. So to keep the prices in parity, exchanges offer a funding fee in a bid to try balance.

Essentially trying to keep two positions open in a bit to farm the funding fee by keeping these two positions open,

So I tried my hand at this and opened an account at pionex and started my own Spot Futures Arbitrage bot. I chose BTC/USDT and immediately, the barrier was the minimum requirement of 300$ which is a lot of money. Other pairings have even higher minimum prices but no matter. I start with the minimum and deploy the bot.

That day was almost two months ago, similar to the video’s 70 days window:

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Opened 60 days ago

Now in the video, Max claims on average he gets about 4% in the bear market, which is probably with the default 2x leverage that the bot sets. However, I didn’t want to risk that so I decided to go with 1x leverage so technically the expectation is around 2%. The reality is:

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And the results are in

That is pretty close with the history APR being just 0.05 off the estimated 2%. Still it is underwhelming compared with arguably the 10x you can get with the 20% on Anchor with UST. However, the facts and strategy behind the bot are solid. And that is one thing I consider. It is a solid investment with low risk and stable rewards. In these trying times, it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of fiat in different places getting you some diversification and reduced risk.

Anyways, there are less complex bots and more complex ones. If you have stories with other bots please do share with us and let's compare how much we made, or lost lol.

The link to the video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjJGVXZUpQE

Discussion about spot futures arbitrage starts at 4 min and 26 second mark