HOW TO OUTSMART TRADING BOTS?
Don't you just hate when you are on the BitShares/OpenLedger exchange, you want to buy or sell something and instantly after you put your order there is an order better than yours?
Well these are trading bots and people do use them everywhere. It doesn't matter what you trade and on what market you are. If there is supply and demand, buy and sell orders, some liquidity and profit to be made you can bet that there will be bots.
The thing is that you can't beat them!
But you can outsmart them, because you know the real price and the real value. This method worked on the steam market, because bots always wanted to be below the current price. However they didn't really know the how valuable the item is and sometimes were selling very cheaply. Information is the thing that they don't have.
You can see them everywhere and what they do sometimes doensn't even make sense. But there is an opportunity to use this in your advantage too. Accounts using bots paid a lot in fees and their accounts are full of tokens and coins I have never heard of.
It's understandable as those markets are less known and the spread is much bigger. And that is how the trading bots make money...
selling high and buying low.
I found one trading bot in a very small market, in the Narwhals/BTS pair. I started testing him out. I have discovered that when I put an order it always almost instantly put my order below its. I started increasing the price little by little till we were really close to the sell orders.
We moved from the start which was 0,31 BTS per narwhal token (that was actually my buy order so the the real price was even lower than that) to 1,2 BTS per token without any difficulty. That was a profit of 9 BTS minus some insignificant fees. With current price of BTS this was a 1,5 USD profit for a token that doesn't have pretty much any value.
I also tried it other way around, but the bot understandably didn't want to go below it's buying price that much.
So there you have it. The bot will not put any buy order before he sell what he has bought. If you see any trading bot and very scarce market you know what you have to do now! :)
Thank you!
My previous posts:
https://steemit.com/gaming/@eirik/the-international-2017-main-event-the-finale-win-sbd
https://steemit.com/contest/@eirik/the-international-2017-main-event-day-5-win-sbd
Thanks. Good thinking.
I've tried to compete with bots before I knew there were such things - some call them market makers - hmmmm. I did waste a bit of time once playing with one - driving the buy price upwards without any intention of buying - my bad!
Perhaps some clever duck will devise a "Beat-the-Bot" program or strategy that will negate the bots effectiveness and people will resort to more human trading techniques - like, say, throwing darts at a list of alternatives and buying the one the point touches.
very interesting. I don't proclame to know anything about crypto but when I see posts like this it just give me more and more ideas of ways i can analyse blockchain data.
Thanks for sharing
This isn't even analysis of blockchain data. It's an analysis of the behavior of a rather overly simplistic robot. If it wasn't overly simplistic, it wouldn't be so easy to manipulate it into giving you its owners' money like that.
Hey paulag! It's always amazing to help someone! :)
Interesting analysis. I am writing up a post on much larger trading bots working in Bitcoin, but I see they are in even the smallest markets.
I think on Bitcoin market it works little bit different as there is not that huge of a spread. However it is always worth for trading bots to be on any market.
Is this how the war of AI against mankind begins?
This is probably not, but OpenAI is. :)
I love forex trading.
great article and adding to my knowledge, thank you
This is pretty clever. If you can't beat them, outsmart them!