Right, here we go.
I have tested quite a few bots over the past few months. These are my views, opinions and experiences only. I am not employed or sponsored by any of these companies, but will post referral links that may benefit me. This is a summary of four months of reading, researching and testing.
One of the biggest tragedies in this space must be Cryptohopper. They have a web-based system that looks good, but is expensive and unstable. This thing would miss trades, go offline and ignore settings. It has so much potential, but it is basically a beta program that you’re paying to test. $99 for this per month – fook that. Other systems I tried were 3 commas, Haas and a few of the free offerings. The free stuff is free for a reason..... None of them quite did it for me. I’m not a fan of subscription services and I have had issues with the web-based systems (stability, consistency and support).
Enter Gunbot.
Gunbot is available for just about any platform. I mentioned before that it needs to run 24/7 to trade. I tried an old box at home, but it was unreliable. I tried a Linux VPS, but my lack of Linux skills frustrated the hell out of me. Apparently it is quite easy to set up on Linux, I just didn’t have the energy to fiddle. The upside to a Linux VPS is that it is cheaper and the fekking thing won’t reboot to install updates. In the end, I settled for a Contabo Windows server package that costs around EUR15 per month and has served me well. Gunthar, the system architect, has promoted AWS but I have read mixed reviews on the service.
The latest Gunbot version is V9. V10 is due for release soon (shout if you want the current beta specs).
There are various versions of GB:
-Lite: this will allow you to trade one strategy (emotionless) on one exchange.
-Standard: this allows you to run all strategies on one exchange.
-Pro: as above with more exchanges.
-Ultimate: as above and includes the Tradingview plugin.
-Botrage: an awesome (according to others) arbitrage bot that I have seen available from time to time. It’s expensive and I don’t know why the availability has been sporadic.
I picked up a Lite version, but soon upgraded to Standard. They do charge less if you upgrade. If your Lite cost you 0.02BTC, then they will discount this fee when your upgrade (the official resellers, that is). Pretty cool that you can dip your toes in and not be penalised if you want to upgrade.
If you are considering buying this software, please take note of the following:
-There are certified resellers. These are listed in the wiki. Do not buy from anyone else – you may get a dud, infected software, no updates etc.
-I would check the official forum (gunthy.org). They have a section where folks who want to sell their licenses, list. You can pick up bargains and they are officially certified. The sale works through an escrow process to ensure that no one gets done in.
-The resellers also have sales from time to time and some include setup assistance and small things like that. I’ll list a few below and give you my opinions on their service.
Add ons:
There are a few add-ons that you may or may not find useful. I’m happy to write up some detail on these if I have them and if you would like to see more:
-GB links to a Telegram account and will notify you of each trade. This is standard and there is no other notification (unless your broker has something).
-Cryptosight is included in some packages or is an add-on. I would not buy this just yet. If it comes with your package, cool. If you want to know what it adds, I’d be happy to show you. It’s basically another Telegram bot with a few added features.
-Zeno. This is a $250 GUI that is nice, but costly. It really is useful when you’re running multiple setups, exchanges, strategies and the like. Both Cryptosight and GBV10 supposedly have some neat updates, so lets see if they come close to Zeno. Zeno also has a Telegram bot that will check if your bot is running, check balances, trade and a few other things.
-Tradingview plugin. The Standard and up versions allow you to use all of the Gunbot strategies. You can use combinations of indicators, oscillators, trailing features, auto cost averaging, reversal trading (a bit of a misnomer in my opinion), Bollinger bands and so on. With the TV plugin, you can use the email alert to trigger a trade on you bot. It is effective but first see what TV sub you will need. They limit alerts per plan and there is one buy and one sell alert per trade. I think Poloniex allows you to short, so it may then be one sell and one buy. Same thing, really.
- There are options available to add exchanges or change exchanges too.
Due to the volume of trades, I use Binance. I have had no issues with them except for the API deletions a few weeks ago. 0.05% fees vs. 0.1% and sometimes more can make a difference. Here is my referral link:
https://www.binance.com/?ref=28629702
Links:
Official wiki:
https://github.com/GuntharDeNiro/BTCT/wiki . This is also the only place where you should download the software. Lite versions will be sent by the resellers, but the rest of the versions should be downloaded from here.
Official forum:
https://gunthy.org/forum/ . It’s pretty dead here now. Most of the action is on Telegram. I can invite you to the various groups if you’d like access and have the app.
Resellers:
You can hit the Googles and look for resellers. The official wiki suggests resellers on the gitbub documentation. They are all bound by an agreement and you can lodge a complaint to Gunthar if you have any issues with them. I have dealt with just about all of them, buying something from each of them. All transactions are in Crypto (BTC obviously being the norm, but some do accept other coins) and timing depends on what you are buying. They are based all over the world, but seem to have someone online 24/7. You can expect to get your license or access within 24 hours. Some offer VPS hosting, this has not worked for me. It takes too long, they have access and having someone else set your system up kind of defeats the purpose of you being the only one with access to your keys.
Tips and a few parting words:
Do not use your exchange to pay for products. It is cheaper to transact from a wallet.
You can use this bot with limited trading knowledge. I set up a test bot on the “emotionless” strategy yesterday with high volume pairs and the attached pic is my profit from 2018/07/17 at 20:00 to 20118/07/18 at 05:34
I cannot guarantee that your results and experiences will be the same as mine. My main source of income for several years now has been trading FX and Indices – and recently Crypto – so I do have an advantage over someone who is just starting out. For the more experienced, there are so many ways to tweak this to make good profits. I’m not saying that this is the perfect solution for everyone and I don’t claim to be the most knowledgeable in this area but I hope this can help someone out and save some time and money.
There are Telegram channels that have great support and I would be happy to answer any questions or help anyone, time permitting. I do have tweaks and configs for a number of strategies and can also help you with scripts – free and paid ones. There are some that work great for FX too if you have a broker that can trade directly off Tradingview.
So that’s it. Let me know if you need anything else and I’d be glad to have some input from anyone using this already.
I was trying to set up Zeno, Cryptosight and GB. I have zero Linux experience, so it was a mess. I'll look into this again sometime, I definitely think it is the way to go. I'm beta testing GB V10 now. It's a major update and quite an improvement. Went to sleep with build 724 running, downloading 727 now. They're coming through thick and fast. I suspect it will be released in the coming weeks. We're ticking off the snag list now.