Trading bots are a great way to make passive income in crypto. The beauty is they can make income no matter which direction the market is moving. What is keeping most people from using trading bots? Well, they can be quite confusing and investors should really put their capital into things that they understand. Bots are becoming more and more mainstream and a number of options out there continue to grow making them easier for experienced traders and novices alike to take advantage of.

This is the third article in a series on trading bots. Feel free to go back and read and Crypto Trading Bots Introduction and Crypto Trading Bots - Algorithm Strategies for additional information on trading bots. 

Not all bots are equal and many developers have just thrown up bots to make money from sales with not enough focus on the actual quality. Below we are going to go over some of the more popular trading bots out there and as such they tend to be tried and true. This doesn't mean they are the best pre-existing bots on the market, but they are fairly simple to use and there is plenty of documentation and support out there should you need it.

LIST OF POPULAR TRADING BOTS

• Pionex
• CryptoHopper
• Hummingbot
• Coinigy
• Bitsgap
• HaasOnline
• 3Commas
• Shrimpy
• Zignaly
• Kryll
• Coinrule
• Trade Santa
• HodlBot
• 4C-Trading
• ProfitTrailer
• Gunbot

I have the most experience with the first two on the list, Pionex and CryptoHopper. They are quite popular, however, they do require a KYC (know your customer) process so if you don't want to reveal who you are they might not be great choices. Then again, you have to KYC on many exchanges anyway so it may not be a big deal. 

Pionex is a bot you can get for free and start with a very minimal amount of capital. It is a very popular choice with over 100,000 users and $5 billion in trading volume every month. Pionex focuses on grid trading, meaning they use lots of buy and sell orders to make a profit so long as the asset being traded stays in the set price range. Essentially, their bots buy when the crypto is trading in the low side of the price range and sells when the crypto reaches the high side. This is a pretty simple strategy to follow and a good choice for beginners, but still depends on your inputs which includes the coin/token to trade and the price range to follow. Pionex has their own exchange and the trading fee is only 0.05% for the maker and taker which is one reason they offer a free bot.

CryptoHopper offers a free bot (Pioneer) which gives you access to 20 positions and portfolio management on all their available exchanges. They also have a free trial on their Explorer package with three primary options; Explorer ($16.58/month), Adventurer ($41.58/month) and Hero ($83.25/month). Each level gives you an increasing number of positions (80, 200, 500) along with additional features. CryptoHopper offers a variety of bot algorithm strategies so is a decent choice for someone with some experience in bot trading or someone who wants to put in time to learn various strategies.

OPEN SOURCE TRADING BOTS

If you want to take your bot trading to the next level, you can build your own starting with open source code that you can tweak to perform exactly how you want. The bots listed below are all free and after downloading them only require limited command line experience to get them up and running. There is a blurry line between the full trading bots as listed above and open source trading here so much comes down to personal preference.

I generally pull all my open source code from GitHub. One example here is Zenbot which is a command-line cryptocurrency trading bot using Node.js and MongoDB. I've downloaded the GitHub app onto my laptop and I use the Virtual Studio Code app to edit code, although other code editing software options exist. 

Another open source code example is freqtrade, which is a free and open source crypto trading bot written in Python. It is designed to support all major exchanges and be controlled via Telegram or webUI. It contains backtesting, plotting and money management tools as well as strategy optimization by machine learning. They also have their own site - Freqtrade which is a bonus.

Superalgos is another open source bot known for their trading automation and crypto market research platform. They strive to integrate all the elements required to generate trading intelligence. Superalgos allows end-users to build complex trading strategies through a visual designer with built-in backtesting capabilities using historical market data.

Conclusion

There are tons of options in terms of crypto trading bots. For beginners I would suggest starting with a popular trading bot with a limited amount of capital as you learn the ropes. The goal here is experience which will help you build strategies and algorithms that work well. After you are up and running, try diversifying your bots and strategies to minimize risk.

For more advanced traders and those with some limited programming knowledge, open source trading bots may be a good choice. If you are heavy on trading knowledge, but limited in programming I would choose a bot written in Python as it is easier to grasp than code in C, C++, Javascript or Perl. If you are a very experienced trader and very comfortable with programming, you can look to build a bot from scratch but I'd still suggest using some open source code to jump start your journey.

If you want to take advantage of the passive income that trading bots can produce, but don't want to mess with actual bots I have another option for you that we will cover next week. It is a project I have been working on with my team for awhile and the first of its kind in the crypto space. The goal was to bring bot trading to the masses in a simple manner that is easy to understand and profit from.