Trading Bots

Data as of 19 August 2026

A trading bot is software that connects to your exchange account through API keys and executes a strategy around the clock: recurring buys, grid orders, portfolio rebalancing, or a copy of someone else's setup. That is the whole product. The part the landing pages leave out is just as simple: a bot automates your strategy, it does not know the future, and a bad strategy on autopilot loses money more consistently than a bad strategy applied by hand. Treat everything below as tooling, not as a promise of returns.

What to check before connecting one

Strategy risk comes first. Grid bots bleed in strong trends, trend bots get chopped up in sideways markets, and a backtest can be tuned until it looks perfect on the past while meaning nothing about the future. Marketplace leaderboards add survivorship bias on top: you see the strategies that happened to win. Paper trade first, then start with money you can afford to lose entirely.

Count the real costs. A bot pays its subscription, plus the exchange fee on every trade it makes, plus slippage. Strategies that trade often can hand their whole edge to fees. Frequent trading also creates a long ledger the tax office may care about, so keep the export files.

API key hygiene is the security model. The keys are the attack surface: create them with trading permission only and withdrawals disabled, use the IP allowlist where the exchange offers one, give each service its own key, and revoke keys the day you stop. The industry learned this in December 2022, when a leak of customer API keys at 3Commas was used to place unauthorized trades on connected accounts. With withdrawal rights off, a leaked key cannot empty your account, which is exactly why that switch matters.

The exchange underneath must be legal for you. A bot is not a licensed service; it rides on your exchange account. In the EEA that means the venue itself should hold a MiCA authorisation, whatever the bot's own marketing says.

Side by side

All three connect to the major exchanges with API keys and none of them ever needs withdrawal rights. Profiles of each follow below, caveats included.