Introduction

TradeSanta is an amazing, easy, and free (at the time of this writing) automated cryptocurrency trading bot. But there is some learning curve to the platform to be able to make profit safely and minimize loss.

To motivate learning how the bot settings works, new traders have to understand there is no such thing as the perfect configuration because there are so many variables. So what works for one pair (i.e. BTC/USDT) one day, may not actually work for another. Allowing any other trader to dictate what should work for you, will never make you comfortable. The only way to trust your bot in generating profit is to know how to use it, and why it does what it does. In this guide you will understand how each of the bot settings works where this truth will be more clear to you.

We will be going to explore every bot settings in a completely new light. Non tech-savy cryptocurrency fans and traders may consider the word “bot” as a heavy geek word. Therefore we will make some assumptions to make it easier for you to like, understand and appreciate this bot technology in a more simple context.

Imagine you are the owner of a company called ProfitGen, and each bot setting is a team. We’re going to explore the basic function of each team, then understand how you can instruct these teams cooperate together to generate profit for you.

Your Bot Settings / Teams

Strategy Team:
Two people work in this department, LongWoman, & ShortMan. Mrs. Long is optimistic, she likes to buy coins at low prices believing that the prices will increase as time goes forward, and then sells at a higher price to collect profits. Mr. Short is pessimistic, he believes that the coin prices will eventually drop, and therefore he sells his coins to buy back at lower prices making profit with the price difference. Now you can make use of them both by knowing how they basically work.

Pairs Team:
Imagine each trading pair on the exchange you are using as a person here. The more you know about how the trading pair behaves (volume, volatility, buy support level etc.) , the better you can customize your bot configuration to work for this trading pair (person).

Take Profit Team:
Only one person working in this department, his name is Mr. Greed and his only job is to take profit. You need to instruct him how much profit he should make in each trade. Be careful though, because Mr. Greed works best when he cooperates properly with the Extra Order Team.

Volume Team:
Mr. Boring’s job is very simple. Just let him know what is the amount of money you want to invest for your first order or the percentage from your deposit, and he will set it up. He will also let you know what is the minimum amount and not allow you to trade with a lower value.

Extra Order Team:
This is the army of soldiers who work with the blessing from Mr. Greed (Take Profit Team). Their job is create extra orders once the first order has proven to create profit set by Mr. Greed. There are 2 main tactics to work with this team, either use this army to maximize profit in a guaranteed bullish momentum or minimize loss while increasing profit chances in an unstable environment. We will see how soon.

Guide Your Teams

Before going on with the advanced configuration (teams) sections, let us first understand how we can work with the basic teams.

Let’s say you have set take profit to 1% for the first order, and step of extra order to 0.3% with a maximum count of 3 extra orders. What does this do? When the bot started trading your pair EOS/USDT, 1 EOS = 10 USD.

1. Bot buys 1 EOS for $10.
2. EOS price increases and gets closer to the 1% profit target from original price to be $10.05 now.
3. Mr. Greed tells extra order team to make more orders because this coin seems profitable.
4. Extra order army has specific instructions to create 3 orders, where each buy order is cheaper 0.3% than the previous order. Such that the buy orders created will be as follows:
   • First order: Buy EOS again at $9.97 (Why? because 0.3% of $10 = $0.03, and 10 – 0.03 = $9.97).
   • Second order: Buy EOS at $9.94 (9.97 – 0.03).
   • Third order: Buy EOS at $9.91 (9.94 – 0.03)

Now that you know how Mr. Greed works with the Extra order team, it’s time to tell you about an invisible team called Calculate Profit Team. Mr. Smart’s job is very important for your company, he creates the sell orders (in the Long strategy and buy order in the Short one) that will make sure that Mr. Greed gets his profit percentage target. But he is very smart, because each time the coin price decreases, and an extra buy order is filled, Mr. Smart recalculates profit to a lower sell order price that will still achieve the 1% profit target you set. This means that when the coin price goes up again, it will be more likely that the sell price order is reached and the profit collected (deal finished) because you bought more of the coin at a cheaper price than the original (first) buy order.

You now understand the very core technique on how TradeSanta bot teams are working for you. You have made lots of profit and decided to take a vacation to Hawaii. But before that you need to hire a CEO to run your company.

Your CEO’s Strategy of Choice

You have two candidates, Mr. Careful, and Mrs. Bold. Both of them will generate profits for you in their own way, but you may definitely have a preference to one of their approaches.

Bet on bull force leverage (High Profit + High Risk).

Mrs. Bold uses a strategy that works better in a bullish market momentum. When a certain trading pair is experiencing some serious price gains, Mrs. Bold knows how to take this opportunity to her advantage. She instructs Mr. Greed to take profit at 0.3 up to 0.7%, and the extra order team to create a new extra order step every 0.1%, 0.2%, or 0.3% depending on the situation. So what does this mean? This means that Mrs. Bold is very confident that a certain trading pair will not decrease much before making leaps of price gains. She knows that setting a high extra order step such as 0.5% or 1% will never be executed because many traders are buying this coin right now, maybe the hype is high around some news or achievement.

The benefit of creating small percentage extra order step such as 0.1% to 0.3% is that you guarantee more of the buy orders created will be fulfilled, and when the price goes up again the profit will be higher because the amount of money invested in this deal is more now. The downside of Mrs. Bold strategy that if Mr. CoinPrice beat all the extra order army, and escapes to a much lower price, the sell orders calculated by Mr. Smart will never be executed.

Bet on price drop leverage (Low Risk + Possible High Profit).

That is why Mr. Careful has a different strategy. He instructs Mr. Greed to take profit at 0.3% to 0.7% but this time he sets the extra order step to 0.5% up to 0.7% or maybe even 1% or more. He thinks that being safe is more important. By increasing the extra order step percentage, it is much less likely that Mr. CoinPrice will escape them when the coin price gets lower. Thus, this plan is better if you prefer lower risk trading. By having an army of extra orders at low (cheap) prices. If the extra orders are filled, they’re more likely to bounce back to meet the newly calculated profit sell order at a lower price than the original sell order.

So which CEO you prefer for your company, Mrs. Bold or Mr. Careful? It’s totally up to you!

Some ideas to consider.

Volume matters. The basic rule is, high volume means a more stable price, and low volume means a tendency for higher volatility (continuous price bounce) but with higher trading risk. Trading pairs with the highest volumes (highest number of current buy and sell orders) are less likely to abruptly crash to lower prices and safer to try Mrs. Bold strategy with.

Increasing extra step percentage means better price drop support. As long as you are aware of the pair price you are trading with, Mrs. Bold strategy is manageable by cancelling the deal any time a significant price drop occurs. But if you do not want to keep alert or track your coin price and you are confident that this coin will not lower more than 3% in one day, you can increase the extra order step starting 0.7% or more (0.7 x 4 extra orders = 2.8% drop army support). The more you increase it, the safer you are but the less likely the buy orders will execute. But in case it did and bounced back, you will make more profits in a safer strategy.

Find the balance between deal frequency and profit percentage. Today there are many competitive cryptocurrency bots and mega whales trading with high volumes and low percentage gains. This is why it is very hard to make profit especially with low starting budgets such as $50 or $100. So keep in mind that the lower is the take profit percentage the higher is the frequency of deals that may generate more profit on the long run. Setting the take profit to 0.1% will give you the maximum deal/profit frequency but there is one drawback, if the coin price pumps (or dumps in short strategy) very fast, the bot takes some time to start the next deal and you miss a good opportunity of the pump. In which case 0.2% take profit or higher will have been better. It is very important that you find this balance yourself because there is no correct answer, but there is only appropriate decisions made to be suitable for a specific coin at a certain time (i.e. trading news, rumors, or a guaranteed technical analysis indicator) . Do not be fooled by a $0.01 profit that doesn’t look so good in the results, because it’s the frequency that adds up at the end of the day. 10 cents profit every 20 minutes makes $7 a day for a $100 investment in a bullish market.

Market Price & Commission

Something that is not very clear to beginners about TradeSanta bot, is that using no filters at all, doesn’t mean the bot is not using some common sense to spot a good price entry for the pair you chose. Most beginners think that the “bot will start shortly” is some kind of lag, well it’s not.

This will be more clear when you try to force start the bot, in which case it will warn you that all technical indicators will be ignored. I believe it’s better to leave the bot to spot a good entry price and never force start.

I have personally never used these options, I don’t know much about them. But I use BNB for my Binance fees as there is some discount using it. The only way I see “Buying coins for commission” useful is when you set the bot to run indefinitely without any intervention to buy BNB trading fees from time to time, but that doesn’t make much sense since TradeSanta may soon introduce monthly price plans for using their bot soon, in which case intervention is a must.

Time for Filter Teams

Mr. History works in the Day filter team. He checks if the previous day coin performance was good in order to decide if entering today will be profitable. I’m not sure exactly how it works, that’s why I rarely use this filter. But I guess it’s useful to have it on, if you plan on trading on low volume coins that are super hyped at times and tend to dump the next day. In which case the bot will not trade it on the Long strategy (supposedly, I’ve never tried it).

Mr. Sports works in the Volume filter team. He checks if the trading pair you chose has enough number of buyers/sellers, because Mr. Smart in the calculate profit team wants to make sure the profit orders execute quickly and he will not be stuck on a losing trade. This filter is good if you want to trade on coins that are with high volatility (price fluctuation) but you are also not sure if there is enough volume to execute your profits quicker.

Mr. Bounce works in the Bollinger signal team. Bollinger is a technical trading indicator that is very popular and it is the easiest to understand and make profit with, especially for manual trading. It is based on a 20 day moving average in the center and two bands based on a mathematical concept (standard deviation) that guarantees the price will stay in between these bands most of the time. One of the reasons it works that many bots and humans alike trade based on it. Therefore a common belief generates a common response between traders in many times.

Are Mrs. Bold and Mr. Bounce getting married?

Before jumping on the reason behind this love story, let us first understand that when you activate the Bollinger filter, TradeSanta uses the 5 minute chart (as shown below) to start trading on a pair when the price touches the lower band (in Long strategy) or hits the higher band (in Short strategy).

The advantage of using this filter is to guarantee the effectiveness of your trades at the cost of some time and deal frequency. The reason that Mrs. Bold loves Mr. Bounce is because she can maximize her profit in cases like below (the yellow circle in the middle) when the price hits a bollinger band and 5 extra orders with step 0.1% are executed in real time, therefore when the price bounces again maximum profit will be generated because the bot bought all the dip.

The disadvantage is that bollinger filter may not work very effectively in extremely bullish or bearish markets where the price simply keeps on either the upper side of the band or the lower side for a long time and thus hardly ever be activated. But in sideway markets where for example BTC price is more stable, Mr. Bounce is so happy and bollinger filter works great.

We agreed that there is a trade off for time and deal frequency using Mrs. Bold strategy with Mr. Bounce but on the other hand there also is an opportunity to do more effective trades should you choose this to be your style.

If you are a beginner trader, you can use the bollinger filter for safety trading on high volume coins. But if you want to be safe without using it, increase the extra order step percentage to cover price drop difference and recover possible losses.

Extra order army’s secret weapon!

We have not talked about the count of real-time extra orders. When should we use them and when not? Mr. Fast’s job is to create the real time orders required all at the same time. The optimal condition you would want to use it for, is Mrs. Bold’s strategy to capture all the price dip of a traded coin because sometimes the price moves so fast, the extra orders are needed to be created from the beginning to capture that dip.

Why would anyone not want to use real time extra orders?

Simple. If you have a budget of $100 you want to invest safely, and you want to create several bots, then you want to make sure that each of the bots can find the resources it needs to trade when it needs it. Let’s say you trade with USDT. Why open 4 x $10 extra orders, when you know that they will not be executed right away? In most cases (if your extra order step percentage is high enough) you will need 1 extra order, and the remaining $30 can be used by other bots to generate profit at the same time. This optimizes your funds usage to the maximum, but you need to be aware for bots not to overlap, otherwise you will receive the error insufficient funds. If you plan your bots carefully you will be able to make sure that the chances of collusion are small, and that each bot will be able to have the funds to create an extra order when it needs it.

If you set extra step % from 0.5% to 1% for a high volume coin it may be considered safe to let the real time extra order set to 1, because you know that the price movement will not be so fast for your strategy. But setting below 0.5% specifically for highly volatile coins means that the bot may not have time to create an extra order and so you lose the buy or sell opportunity depending if you are Long or Short strategy.

Conclusion: Use real time extra orders if your extra step percentage is considered too low and you expected price movement direction is too fast.

Enter Commando: Martin Gale

In TradeSanta’s arsenal of weapons there is a special force commando called Martingale. We have previously learned that the more we increase the extra order step percentage and it is filled, the better Mr. Smart will calculate a new take profit order with a price more likely to be filled. But there is a way to have even a better take profit price, by using Martingale to increase volume of order in each extra order.

As you can see in the screenshot, the minimum configuration is 1.05 and the maximum is 2. Usually you will want set it from 1.05 to 1.5. More than that could be considered very aggressive, but first let’s understand what it does.

So you have a $100 investment, you setup the configuration and your first order is $10, second $10, third $10 without using martingale. If you set Martingale to 1.5, this means your second order will be 1.5 x 10 = $15. Third order will be 1.5 x 15 = $22.5, and therefore your fourth order will be $33.75. This means that buying or selling volume increases in each order from the previous order. But how can this be useful? Increasing the volume is just another way to maximize profit while also giving Mr. Smart (calculate profit team) the ability to calculate a better take profit order price that is more likely to be fulfilled.

Is it dangerous to use Martingale?

It is dangerous only if you don’t understand what it does, and if you increase the volume too much. Let’s say you invest a $300 dollar budget, and you use Martingale set to 2x. if your first order is $100, the second order will be $200. In order to have the maximum benefit from Mr. Martin, we have to make sure Mr. Greed isn’t too greedy and make risk assessment before increasing this setting above the default 1.05 x.

Exchange balance keeps decreasing.

One of the trickiest issues in this bot business is to be able to measure profit and loss, this has become much harder because there are too many values pegged to each other in the cryptocurrency space.

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To be able to measure profits a lot of the time I take screenshots on my Binance app to review it later and see if there was any difference in the pair I was trying to increase, because trust me when I tell you you will not be able to remember well especially if BTC balance decreases as shown above.

Profit understanding guidelines:

1. Specify what you need to increase. BTC, ETH, BNB or USDT?
2. Take a screenshot of only the pair you want to maximize (not total balance) you are trying to increase before activating the bot.
3. Understand that binance total assets is sometimes misleading considering it calculates the total of your asset’s worth in BTC, and how much of that BTC equals to USDT, which is why TradeSanta admins advise to check the dollar value for profits.
4. Understand that if you are using BNB for the binance trading fees, the price fluctuations on the BNB/USDT value will mislead you into thinking you haven’t made any gains. If you make extra $1 a day in cryptocurrency, and BNB is +$1 -$1 a day, you may be able to notice your profits in the total balance of binance in at least 2 or 3 days. But then again, using screenshots on the specific pairs you are trying to increase is better and more accurate.

Prioritize BTC over USDT trading. Don’t do my mistake.

As you can see in the screenshots above I am at a gain for $USD value but at loss in BTC value. This is one of my recent mistakes that I learned from is to never trade on USDT when BTC price is pumping, because then my USDT power to purchase BTC will be low and I will always see my total balance decreasing. This is why many traders sell their alts for BTC when it pumps. Although USDT trading seems very interesting when BTC is pumping because going Long is always easier to imagine than Short strategy.

So what I learned is to play short strategy on any of the BTC pairs, like ETH, or BNB betting on the dominance of BTC that will let the alt coins behind for some time.

Do not copy paste other people’s bot configuration without understanding what they do, and if they are suitable for your own choice of trading pair.

One of the interesting things of not copy pasting other people’s bot configuration is that you can be infinitely creative in making profits better than anyone else, because you saw something others didn’t. For example, I noticed that LTC has been over hyped with a large increase in USDT value before the latest BTC pump. What does this mean? This means that the price of LTC/BTC will likely start falling which is a great opportunity for a Short strategy. I checked on tradingview.com and confirmed that this pair is in dumping mode while also looking at the long term trend charts. These patterns happen all the time, all we need is to spot them and customize a bot configuration setting that suits their behavior. No body will be able to tell you that, it’s based on experience, trial and error.

Understanding Short Strategy

In order to make the best use of Short strategy, we need to be able to look carefully at the 4 hour and 1 day trading charts to see where the main trend is going. In the beginning I had great difficult understanding how can I make profit with a trading pair when it keeps consistently going down.

That’s because the truth is different than what it sounds. Any trading pair whose price keep falling on the main trend does not mean there is no buying spikes going on, because these are the small pumps that generate your profit.

As you can see in this illustration of BTC/LTC the price is dumping on the main trend, but there are some green ladder price pumps on the way. When you create your bot settings you have to see how much these small price pumps were to be able to set a suitable extra order step percentage. To guarantee minimum profit but maximum safety in a trading pair that is dumping so fast, but you have to Short it as soon as possible, you may consider setting the extra order step to 0.1% (filling on the green spikes) and the take profit from 0.1% to 0.7% depending on how fast the coin is dumping (to buy the cheapest price possible). In high volume pairs such as this one, taking profit 0.7% may take a very long time to reach, therefore you have to calculate the trade off in time and deal frequency and use your imagination to know what is best for your style.

This marks the end of the TradeSanta bot guide, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I am still learning and I don’t know everything, feel free to telegram me any time @tommy737 I may be able to help you. If you found it have any benefit to your trades and you like to tip me, the following are the cryptocurrency addreses I own.

BTC:
1MXTFei1HhdJeACq9EiAxu3FX5qt7gWZwD

ETH:
0x46F42bc85a54ca9b54B1Ef9b4B2a6AFf4bAaFa6f

EOS:
tommyboy1144

TUSD:
0x46F42bc85a54ca9b54B1Ef9b4B2a6AFf4bAaFa6f

Thank you for spending your time reading my blog.