There are different ways you can support BB:
1. Create your Binance account using this link: https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=XE3KYX0R. You’ll also benefit from a 10% discount on your Binance trading fees
2. Create your Vultr account using this link: https://www.vultr.com/?ref=8863881
3. Give a donation. For more information, see this page
The developers of Balance Bot are not paid for their work. Your support is greatly appreciated.
There is no specific limit. The only thing to keep in mind is that exchanges apply a minimum order size. Therefore, please make sure that your total portfolio amount is not too small and/or that you don’t split it over too many different coins. Otherwise, trades may get refused and it will be difficult to keep your portfolio in balance.
The short answer: yes! BB supports any …/basecoin and basecoin/… pair on your exchange. If a stable coins or EUR doesn’t have a …/basecoin pair, then BB will automatically use the equivalent basecoin/… pair instead to make trades. In this case, the table on the portfolio screen will show ‘reverse’ in the order side column (as a sell order is reversed into a buy order through the basecoin/… pair, and vice versa).
If you’re running BB on your PC, make sure that it doesn’t power off, as that will obviously stop your bot(s).
In any case, depending on how the market moves, and your coins in particular, it is quite common that not much happens over the span of several hours. This also very much depends on the threshold percentage that you’ve configured, of course.
If you’re wondering if the bot is still running, open the web dashboard, and check the status in the top right corner. It should show ‘connected’ and a recent timestamp. Also, in the Bot Manager you can see the status of all of your bots.
The refresh rate is 10 seconds.
Trading tools often show the distribution of your portfolio. However, this data is not updated as frequently as with BB. As a result, you may see (significant) differences between the two applications. In case of doubt, you may want to check the real-time price information in your trading tool and compare those with the prices in BB. You should see prices that are (almost) identical.
Your basecoin is never sold or bought. It is used as the exchange currency for your other coins. As a result, you may see a base coin distribution that is beyond the configured threshold. That isn’t a problem, as with subsequent altcoin trades, the basecoin distribution will be corrected automatically.
Exchanges enforce specific trading rules (e.g. see https://www.binance.com/en/trade-rule). If the minimum trade amount or minimum order size requirements are not met, BB will not place an order. If this is the case for your bot, the portfolio table will show the trade amount in orange. To resolve the issue, increase the liquidity in your portfolio, reduce the number of coins, or increase the threshold percentage.
It depends… The limiting factor are your exchange’s trading rules. Exchanges define a minimum trade amount and minimum order size for each trading pair. If your portfolio is very small, then BB may not be able to place orders because those would not meet the trading rules. An example:
Let’s say you have a portfolio with BTC and USDT, with a 50-50% distribution, and USDT as the basecoin. If you use a threshold of 1%, BB will rebalance as soon as the BTC distribution deviates with 1% from the target (50%), so once BTC has a distribution of 50.5%. Note, this happens as soon at the BTC price has gone up 2%. At that point, 1% of BTC will be sold to restore the balance.
Now, let’s say your exchange requires a minimum order size of $5. That means that 1% of BTC should be $5 or more. And that means that you need at least of $500 worth of BTC in your portfolio. And thus, also $500 worth of USDT.
If you want to put less money in your bot, you can do that by increasing the threshold. If you go from e.g. 1% to 4%, you can reduce your investment by a factor 4. The downside of that is that there will be way fewer opportunities to rebalance, and you will not benefit from smaller price fluctuations. So keep that in mind.
You can set an offset for each coin in your portfolio. The offset tells BB to use more or less of a specific coin when calculating its balance. This may be useful in a number of cases. Let’s say, you have 1 ETH in your spot wallet, and you own 2 ETH outside of your spot wallet, e.g in cold storage, a different wallet, or in staking. If you want BB to not just use the 1 ETH but all 3 ETH for balancing, then you can set an offset of 2 ETH.
A negative offset value is also possible. This way you can reduce the number of coins that are used for balancing, even though all coins are in your spot wallet.
The offset can be set in step 2 of the bot configuration.
If you’re adding or removing liquidity over time, it’s important to register this in the bot configuration (step 3). This way, the performance metrics and graphs remain accurate. For instance, assume that your total portfolio value is $4000. If you want to increase it to $5000, and you just add $1000 like that, the bot would show an increase of 25%. To avoid this, you should change the liquidity settings on the day when you add the $1000. This way the bot can take this into account when computing the performance metrics. Instead of a 25% increase, the bot would compensate for the liquidity injection, and just show the same performance numbers as before the liquidity change.
This process is called ‘normalization’. For more information, see here: Liquidity Changes.
The crypto trading market is strongly influenced by fear and greed, which can lead to massive peaks in trading activity. Exchanges sometimes suffers from those extremes, which may impact the responsiveness of their API. This in turn may lead to BB not being able to retrieve the most up to date information about your portfolio, or no information at all. Although this is beyond the control of BB, a few measures are in place to mitigate such situations, at least to some extent:
- BB uses so-called websockets API for retrieving balance information. This API is typically more stable and responsive than the so-called REST API
- BB validates that a placed order actually results in an updated balance for the traded coin. For instance, if an order is placed to sell 0.1 BNB, then BB will not accept subsequent orders until the number of BNB has gone down with (approximately) 0.1 BNB. As long as this doesn’t happen, the balance information coming from the exchange cannot be trusted, and no trading decisions should be made based on incorrect information
- BB checks how many trades are executed in the last 5 minutes. If this number exceeds the configured ‘cooldown trigger’, then it will cool down for 1 hour, which means that no trades will be done by BB. This is a last-resort protection against major turbulence on the trading market and/or a serious issue with the exchange’s API and the reliability of the information it provides
Despite those measures, there is no 100% guarantee that BB will not be impacted by problems with the exchange’s API or the information it provides. So it is advised to always keep an eye on the trades that are executed. It is your responsibility to validate that everything is working fine, and if not, to take corrective actions, e.g. to stop your bot(s) until the situation is back to normal.
This shouldn’t happen in the first place. But if it does, the Bot Manager will detect this, and restart the bot automatically.
By using BB, you agree that analytics data is collected. The sole purpose of this data is to understand how many people are using BB and which version, usage patterns, and how many bots are running. Any data collected is 100% anonymous and non-personal. The data does NOT contain any information about you, your portfolio, trades, financial performance, API keys, etc. BB will NEVER collect any personal or sensitive information.
Most exchanges use a security mechanism, which compares the time of the machine where BB is running with its own server time. Concretely, this means that if your machine’s local clock is out of sync, i.e. running a bit ahead or behind, the exchange will not answer any requests from BB. This occasionally happens, mostly for people who are running BB on their Windows PC. The issue can be solved by going to the Windows ‘Date & Time’ settings, and clicking the ‘Sync now’ button. Then, restart BB and see if everything is working as normal again. Please note: it may take some time until the clock sync takes effect. If the problem is still there, try again after 15 minutes or so.