3commas

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Connect Exchange APIs

Link your exchange accounts by giving 3Commas access to your trading account so that your bots can place trades autonomously. Even if you don’t use a bot, it’s stil beneficial to do this as you can execute automated trade orders across all of your exchange accounts at the click of a button.

For example, if you have funds stored with Binance and BitMEX and you wanted to place an automated trade on BTC/ETH when the price hits a certain level, you would normally log in to the exchange platforms individually, then place your orders one-by-one, which is time-consuming. By setting up a single order in 3Commas, your orders are executed across all exchanges when your pre-defined conditions are met.

The process of linking your accounts varies depending on the exchange, but in most cases, it’s:

1. Go into the Settings page of your exchange account
2. Create an API key
3. Copy the API key & secret key
4. In 3commas, go into “My Exchanges” > “Connect to a new account” and select your exchange
5. Paste the API key & secret key from your exchange & connect

 

SmartTrade

SmartTrade enables you to execute trades across multiple exchange platforms. Simply enter your trade settings and execute. The features that you opt for will ultimately depend on your experience and knowledge of how trading strategies work.

 

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Trailing Order

Trailing orders allow you to adjust your stop loss and profit-taking parameters automatically in relation to market conditions.

For example, imagine you’re trading BTC-USDT and Bitcoin is priced at $10,000. If you program a trailing order to exit the trade if it loses 10% in value, the SmartTrade tool will close your trade if the price of Bitcoin goes down by 10% to $9,000.

On the contrary, if the price goes up, a trailing order will adjust both your stop loss parameters and your take-profit percentages. For example, if Bitcoin increases in value by 20% and is priced at $12,000, your previous stop loss of $9,000 (-10% of the original $10,000 price) will move up to $10,800 (-10% of $12,000), enabling you to make more profit and mitigate your risk simultaneously.

Short Sells

As long as you are using an exchange that supports short sells, the SmartTrader tool allows you to execute short orders. For example, if you are trading ETH-USD and a key level of support is about to be broken, you can program the bot to sell your current holdings.

This is especially beneficial in a bear market, allowing you to profit in a downtrend and adapt to market conditions autonomously.

Smart Sell

Smart sell allows you to sell a specific coin, or group of coins, and then buy them back at a later date.

For example, if you’re holding ETH and your analysis indicates that the price is about to decline in the short term before rising again in the long term, you can set the bot to buy back into the market when the price hits the price you set. Instead of going through the rigmarole of executing this individually across all of your exchange accounts, you can instruct the SmartTrade tool to do this automatically.

You can also engage in automated DCA (Dollar-Cost Averaging) – where you buy a pre-defined amount of coins at regular intervals or every time the asset reaches a new low.

For example, imagine the price of Bitcoin is $10,000 and you decide to buy $3,000 worth, split across $1,000 purchases every 7 days:

– Your first purchase would buy you 0.1 BTC.
– In the second week, the price of Bitcoin drops to $8,000, so your purchase buys you 0.125 BTC.
– The week after, Bitcoin increases to $12,000, so your purchase buys you 0.083 BTC.

In total, you would have 0.308 BTC. Depending on your strategy and desired outcome, having an additional 0.08 BTC as opposed to only 0.3 BTC had you purchased $3,000 worth in week 1, would put you in profit. On the other hand, if the market turned bearish, your overall purchase price of BTC would be the average of your purchases, and thus lower than a single purchase at a higher price.

Automated Bots

There are currently two automated trading bot options: DCA and Grid, with a third Options bot in beta. If you’re an experienced trader and you want to customize your own trading conditions, you can do this with ease. Alternatively, if you’re a newbie trader with little experience in trading strategies, you can instead copy the trading portfolios of other 3Commas users.

However, before we unravel the main features of the automated bots, it is important to note that you cannot install technical analysis metrics into the decision-making process. By this, we mean the likes of Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) or Bollinger bands. Although you have the option of customizing your automated bot, the actual decision-making process is based on the cryptocurrency signal finder issued by TradingView.

TradingView Cryptocurrency Signal Finder

In a nutshell, the TradingView signal finder will scan the cryptocurrency trading markets on a micro-second by micro-second basis, with the view of finding potential profit signals. In total, the protocol issues four order types. This covers a ‘buy’, ‘strong buy’, ‘sell’, and a ‘strong sell’.

Once a signal is issued, and the 3Commas automated bot executes the order, the bot will automatically place a number of orders. This will always include an exit strategy pertaining to both profits and losses, which is determined by the TradingView algorithm.

However, the key point here is that the underlying specifics – such as when to enter and exit the market, can be customized to the ‘t’.

Customizing Your Trading bot

Here are the main metrics that 3Commas will allow you to adjust.

• Exchanges: You can specify the exact cryptocurrency exchanges that you want your custom bot to trade on. If you are looking to trade significant volumes, then it might be best to use multiple exchanges. Don’t worry, the bot will execute your instructions simultaneously, as opposed to placing your orders one-by-one. As such, you won’t miss any potential trading opportunities by spreading your orders over multiple platforms.
• Pairs: You need to specify what trading pairs you want your automated bot to trade on your behalf. For example, if you want your bot to trade BTC/USDT and BTC/ETH, simply enter your chosen pairs from the drop-down list. Before you do, it is well worth looking at the ‘Recommended Pairs’ tab. This lists suitable trading pairs, in relation to the market conditions you stipulate below.
• Initial Trade Size: You need to let the bot know how much you want to open your trade at. Don’t forget, the bot is going to place additional trades once the initial order has been executed, as per your pre-defined conditions. Nevertheless, you need to enter the amount that you want to purchase in relation to the base currency. For example, if you are planning to trade BTC/LTC, then your initial trade size needs to be stipulated in BTC.
• Safety Trade Size: The safety trade parameter is used to perform a cost average exercise. As we briefly covered above, this allows you to bring your average buy price down as the coin declines in value. The bot will typically place a safety trade for every subsequent percent that goes against you.For example, if you are trading ETH/USDT, and you want the bot to place a safety trade at a value of 1.5 ETH, then the bot will do this if the price of ETH declines by 1%, and again if it declines by a further 1%. Much like in the case of the base trade size, your unit of currency needs to match the base currency. So in the above example, this would be ETH, as opposed to USDT.
• Safety Trade Limit: This parameter leads on from the above metric. As noted, the bot may decide to place a new safety order for each 1% decline that goes against you. However, you need to specify how many times you want the bot to do this. For example, if you were to input 4, then the bot would place a new safety trade when the price goes down by 1%, 2%, 3%, and 4%. After this, no more safety trades will be placed.
• Safety Trade Deviation: If you don’t want the bot to determine the percentage drop at which the safety trade is executed, you can specify this yourself. Simply enter the fixed percentage in the box.
• Safety Trade Scale: If you don’t want to confine yourself to a fixed percentage, you can instead instruct the automated bot to utilize a scaled safety trade strategy. For example, you can increase the size of the safety trade for each subsequent percentage decline.
• Trading Volume Restrictions: This particular trading metric is of significant value. Essentially, you can instruct your automated bot to only execute your trading conditions if your chosen pair hits a minimum 24 hour trading volume. For example, if you are looking to trade BTC/ETH, but you only want to enter the market when trading volumes surpass 1,000 BTC, then this can be done.Take note, the minimum 24 hour volume must be expressed as the base currency. Once again, if you were trading BTC/ETH or BTC/USDT, then in both cases the base currency would be BTC.

Trading Signals Marketplace

If the above trading strategies confuse you, or you’re not quite confident enough to go solo, then you might want to consider the 3Commas marketplace for trading signals.

Essentially, you get to purchase trading setups of other 3Commas bots.

The great thing about the marketplace is that you get to view the historical trading results of each and every bot listed on the platform.

As such, you’ll want to pick an automated bot with a reasonably long track-record of netting consistent profits. Each bot will of course have its own underlying strategy, meaning that some will be higher risk than others.

So now that we’ve covered the ins and outs of what you can do at the 3Commas platform, in the next section of our review we are going to unravel the four pricing plans.

3Commas Pricing

3Commas offers four main packages. This ranges from the free Junior plan, up to the top-tier $75 per month Pro plan.

If you do opt for a paid-for plan, then you can either pay by PayPal or cryptocurrency. The former can be set-up as a recurring monthly subscription, while the latter needs to be done manually each and every month. Either way, you can cancel your monthly subscription at any time.

Junior Plan – Free

The free plan comes with the vast majority of 3Commas features, such as the SmartTrade and MarketPlace offerings. However, it doesn’t come with the TradingView pricing signals, meaning you won’t be able to benefit from automated bots. If you do want this, you’ll need to upgrade. Moreover, the free plan can only be utilized if you plan to trade no more than the cryptocurrency equivalent of $750 at any given time.

Starter Plan – $22 per month

Much like in the case of the free plan, the starter plan comes with most features apart from the ability to use automated bots. In fact, the only difference between the two is that the starter plan comes with error and cancellation notifications.

Advanced Plan – $37 per month

If you want to utilize automated bots within your trading strategy, then the cheapest package available is the advanced package. At a cost of $37 per month, you’ll have direct access to the TradingView pricing signal feature.

Pro Plan – $75 per month

If you want all of the bells and whistles offered by 3Commas, then you’ll need to fork out a very competitive $75 per month. You will of course get all of the features offered in the advanced plan, plus more. This includes the ability to utilize both Simple and Composite bots, and unlike the other plans, you can use the bots on BitMEX. Moreover, you also have access to the full portfolio management suite, which isn’t available in any of the other plans.

3Commas Review: The Bottom Line

If you’ve read our 3Commas review from start to finish, you should now have a really good idea as to whether or not the platform is right for your individual trading requirements. Essentially, even if you don’t want to use the automated bot feature, 3Commas still offers a number of valuable tools.

At the core of this is the ability to place trades across multiple exchange platforms via a single market order. For example, if you wanted to place the same trading order on BTC/ETH across Binance, KuCoin and Coinbase Pro –  then 3Commas would eliminate the need to do this individually on all three platforms.

On the other hand, if you do like the sound of what the automated bot offers, then pricing starts at just $37 per month. For this, you can customize your own bot, or simply follow the trading strategies of a bot created by another user.

Ultimately, it might be worth testing the platform out for yourself via the free plan before making a commitment. Alternatively, 3Commas also offers a free trial, where you get to test out the paid-for plans without providing any payment details.