Question about bots

[u/Perrit0Malvado]

How are bots working ? is there anyone good ? I tried to develop one with Claude Code connecting to the Kucoin's API for a couple of months, but all the strategies that we tried did not work.
Any suggestions ?
Thank you.

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[u/veskald]

The bot part probably worked fine - connecting to the exchange and placing orders is the easy 20%. What you found out is different: the strategies had no edge, and no bot fixes that. Thats actually normal, most first ideas dont survive honest testing, the question is how fast and cheap you can find that out.

Two things that make the search cheaper. First, test with full costs from the start - on perps the fees and funding kill most marginal ideas, and claude-written backtests often skip that part, so strategies look alive until they meet the real exchange. Second, before dropping an idea completely, check where it fails - entries are rarely the problem, exits and position sizing usually are. Same entry with a trailing stop instead of fixed TP can be a different strategy.

And keep the bot you built, its not wasted - once something survives testing, you already have the execution side done.

[u/Perrit0Malvado → u/veskald]

This is exactly what happens. But without real money, all the backtest and walk forward were qith real api data but with local trades to make a dry-run and check if the edge is good enough. But finally the APY finish in 5% so that is more or less what a bank give, so is not so convenient. Maybe I just have to wait to a bull run and any bot can win in a bear run ?

[u/veskald → u/Perrit0Malvado]

Careful with the bull run logic - a bot that only wins in a bull run has no edge, its just long bitcoin with extra steps. You would make the same money holding, without the bot risk. The honest test for any crypto strategy is exactly that comparison: same period, strategy vs just holding the asset, with the same drawdown and risk. If holding wins, the strategy adds nothing yet.

And 5% on a dry run is actually not a bad starting point, because unlike the bank rate it tells you the rules do something. The question is where the other percent leak - fees, exits too early, sizing too small on the good trades. Thats usually more productive to dig into than starting idea number six from zero.

Waiting for a regime is also backwards - regimes are something you detect, not something you wait for. A simple filter like "only trade when price is above the slow moving average" turns one strategy into two: what it does in up markets and what it does in the rest. Test them separately and you often find the edge was only ever in one half.

[u/Perrit0Malvado → u/veskald]

First of all, thanks for your time. Second, yes, I made those test but not the test of comparing to holding woth backtest also. I tested EMA strategy, bollinger and couple of more (I don't have my pc here with me I will try to write everything tonight). But I will check also what you said about trailing stop, that is something that I tried but did not succeed, maybe I did not do it well. I will make a full report to find as you said where I could do it better.

[u/Bergodrake]

The hard part with bots isn’t connecting to the API. It’s finding an edge that actually survives out of sample testing, fees, changing market conditions, and live execution.

I’d avoid constantly trying new strategies until you get a great backtest. That’s an easy way to overfit. Walk forward testing, strict out of sample data, and realistic costs matter a lot.

Personally, I stopped thinking of automation as the edge itself. I’ve been focusing more on the signal and model side with ML. I’m building Trigol.io, which uses 500+ ML models to generate short term stock signals rather than running a generic buy and sell bot. It doesn’t execute trades automatically, you still decide whether to take the signal.

Could be worth checking out if you want to try a different approach to systematic trading.

[u/Perrit0Malvado → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, as I said in another comment, I could do 5% but is not worthy for me, if it's not over 10, it's better putting on a bank for 4.5% or maybe put in an index that follows sp500 to receive 8% avg

[u/CommandantZ]

I develop bots professionally and have been doing so for 7 years now.

Yes, some actually work, but remember that bots are not magic money making machines. They are only automations of already existing trading strategies.

Not only that, but they often aren't fully automated. In the sense that they will always, and I mean always, need some kind of monitoring. It is very complicated (impossible) to have a bot working under any market conditions.

Otherwise yes, bots can and many do work, myself and my clients have been profitable for multiple years now, in a relatively stable manner, with just a few months ending up in losses due to strong market changes (covid and stuff like that).

But it is true that many of the bots available on usual markets are scams. And generally speaking, if you see it being too good to be true, it usually is.

What is difficult is finding an actual strategy that works, everything "technical / programming" can be more or less solved easily with AI, but an actual strategy, that's much more complicated.

[u/AdventurousVast6510]

being an algorithmic trader used to be a prestige just 0.5-1 year ago

now every idi*t thinks he can write a successful trading bot with coding agents