Wow guys thank you for all the replies!
I was thinking about it... and it makes sense that you will first need to have a trading strategy/setup in place, and then the next step would be to programme those rules into a bot. I'm not here to talk about 3rd party bots where like exscudo said "you don't even know what's inside it".
And the reason why people who have working and profitable bots usually do not sell it is because, the more people have the bot, the less likely it will be profitable. Imagine someone with a working arbitrage bot, is making money because there is price discrepancies between different exchanges; if everyone has that same bot, the price discrepancies would eventually disappear and not everyone will be able to get part of the pie.
Off the top of my head, one simple setup would be an MA crossover (or even triple MA) which you watch on two timeframes (lower timeframe for deciding entry/exit prices, high timeframe for trend confirmation). Of course, it should have couple more rules in place to avoid taking every trade when MA crosses.. AND it is definitely not as easy as it sounds otherwise everyone would have their own highly profitable trading bots. Like I said, we first need a profitable setup, and then programme those rules into the bot.
Also, I think such trading bot rules will work for more established markets like BTC or ETH, or with traditional money markets. When it comes to altcoins, problems with liquidity likely render most bots useless, or at least will require a different set of rules, or parameters that consider volume and liquidity.
For altcoins, a "volumizer" seems to be pretty common, but I wonder what other functions people who trade altcoins put in their bots.. I could think of so many different kinds of bots for different functions for trading altcoins.. pretty sure whales have bots that can carry out many different functions. Also something interesting could be to create a "research" bot to study volume (among other parameters) of altcoin markets to pick up on anomalies or know when something is brewing.
Seen some talk about "altcoin developers using bots to pump the volume and manipulate the price".. But what would this bot actually do? I'm guessing some functions could include to create volume with self buys/sells, placing buys/sells higher than others, price suppression with large sell walls, etc..
Maybe another way to put my initial question would be:
What is your trading setup/strategy? I'm sure you have a few basic rules that you abide by to some extent.
Whether or not you do, if you were to make one, what rules would it based on?
I don't rely on bots since I'm pretty much online 18 hours a day. *Perks of being a Software Developer.
Secondly,as a python enthusiast,I have deployed a few trading bots according to the custom needs.Furthermore,here are a few suggestions you may want to consider while getting one programmed for trading.
-No 24*7 window.Set a timeout after every satoshi made through the marginal values.
-Keep a bot actively running in the background to send latest prices of the alt's.The trading bot should take these prices,analyze the differences in the span of 15 mins and then decide to trade or not.
-Marginal values should be fetched from a reliable source such as prev or coinbase and not the website's tickr!
Yes, I use such a bot for trading.
Custom developed, it integrates via API on several different popular exchanges* and generates passive income for me via arbitrage (buy bitcoin cheapest possible on x platform, sell higher on y platform). Daily profit varies obviously due to BTC price fluctuations, arbitrage fluctuations, etc. If anybody is seriously interested in it and has a decent offer, PM me
Not willing to release it publicly however for obvious reasons.
*you must have valid and existing accounts on any exchange you want it to use that is supported.
Google will point you to older opensource projects that you can use/abuse to your own needs.
I make and test mostly semi automated stuff.
This one is quite easy to rewrite.
Thank you for the tips!!