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Dear 3Commas users, we are excited to announce that you can now link your FTX exchange accounts to 3Commas to trade.

FTX offers tremendous opportunities for trading derivatives, such as leveraged tokens, cryptocurrency indices, perpetual futures with up to x101 leverage, market volatility contracts, and much more. It is also worth mentioning the low commission, which depends on your trading volume, the minimum spread, and liquidity.

To get the maximum benefit from trading on FTX, you can use Smart Trade, DCA Bots, and Grid Bots.

Please read the instructions for creating an API key and connecting the exchange to 3Commas.

FTX Exchange tools are now available with 3Commas!

Dear 3Commas users, we are excited to announce that you can now link your FTX exchange accounts to 3Commas to...

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Suitable for traders of any level, purchases currencies at opportune moments over set intervals

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At 3Commas, we’re dedicated to providing the best trading tools to our users. As we bring more and more complex products onto our platform, we want to provide a comprehensive guide on options trading for our users that don’t have comprehensive trading backgrounds. Although we love providing access to the best tools for all types of trading strategies, adding expanded product lines comes with the added responsibility of providing educational resources due to the new risks presented. We’re really excited about our upcoming options bots, so we thought it would be a great time to offer a primer on options trading!

First, let’s get a common point of confusion sorted out: What’s the difference between an option and a future?

There’s two types of options: American and European Style.

An options contract gives an investor the right, but not the requirement, to buy/sell shares at a specific price at any time throughout the duration of the contract. Futures, on the other hand, are a contract that requires a buyer to purchase shares (and vice versa) on date in the future, unless the holder’s position is closed prior to contract expiration.

A European option is a version of an options contract that limits execution to its expiration date. In other words, if the underlying security such as a stock has moved in price, an investor would not be able to exercise the option early and take delivery of or sell the shares. Instead, the call or put action will only take place on the date of option maturity.

European style options are used more frequently in the cryptocurrency space (Deribit and Binance for example), however, it’s good to know the difference between the two.

A call option is an offer to buy an asset at the strike price before the agreement expires. Let’s take a look at a real world example:

An investor opens a call option to buy BTC at a $50,000 strike price sometime within the next three months. The BTC is currently trading at $49,000. If BTC jumps to $60,000, the call buyer can exercise the right to buy the BTC at $50,000. That buyer can then immediately sell the BTC for $60,000 for a $10,000 profit per coin.

A put option is an offer to sell an asset at a specific price. Let’s take a look at a real world example:

An investor owns a put option to sell BTC at $100,000 (its current price), and if BTC’s price falls to $80,000 before the option expires, the investor will gain $20,000 per coin, minus the cost of the premium. If the price of BTC is above $100,000 at expiration, the option is worthless and the investor loses the premium paid upfront. Either the put buyer or the writer can close out their option position to lock in a profit or loss at any time before its expiration. This is accomplished by buying the option, in the case of the writer, or selling the option, in the case of the buyer. The put buyer may also choose to exercise the right to sell at the strike price.

So what distinguishes when options are a better strategy than futures contracts? Here’s the aspects of options contracts that give them an advantage over futures:

Due to the overwhelming amount of choices that the options market affords you, there are some very cheap out-of-the-money options. While unlikely to actually pay off, they offer a very inexpensive way to make a cheap bet with huge risk-reward.

Most market participants can’t buy options on leverage. That means whatever price you buy your options for is the maximum loss you can experience. So long as you keep your options position sizing in check, it’s difficult to allow anyone options trade greatly affect your profitability.

In most cases, selling an option is a very risky bet with a small possible reward. So, selling an option is typically only good in terms of hedging your position.

Unlike an option, you cannot execute a futures contract before the delivery date. A vendor might deliver a commodity early at the price in their agreement, but it doesn’t happen until the specified date. This is in contrast to options contracts, which gives the holder the right to exercise the contract at any time until expiration.

Options aren’t always the most ideal trading strategy. Here’s where futures contracts are more advantageous:

Futures markets are some of the most liquid markets in the world, making executing trades seamless and virtually instant without slippage. On the other hand, even the most liquid options markets generally still carry a wider bid-ask spread and are difficult to unload large positions quickly without significant market impact.

In a futures contract, you don’t pay your counterparty until the settlement date. This is in contrast to the options market, where the option buyer forfeits the premium upfront.

Your broker will typically have margin requirements that affect your buying power, but this money isn’t going to your counterparty.

On the flip side, options don’t need to pay funding fees, which can stack up tremendously depending on the size of the position and the time it’s held.

Futures contracts aren’t negatively affected by time decay because all futures contracts are executed at the contract price at settlement. Contrastingly, options have to meet certain criteria to be profitably exercised and as the date gets closer to expiration, they become less valuable because the market has less time to move.

Look out for our article diving deeper on this topic soon!

Options 101 — A Worthy Consideration

At 3Commas, we’re dedicated to providing the best trading tools to our users. As we bring more and more complex...

At 3Commas, we’re always committed to providing our customers with the best trading tools to conquer one of the most difficult and confusing financial industries. Our “bread and butter” bot is our DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging) bot, which you can learn more about here. DCA bots are great for beginners using our service looking for a more conservative strategy to get the best possible price for an asset that they believe is eventually going to rise in value. Using our DCA bots can save a lot of time and help those with a long investment time horizon. However, DCA bots aren’t optimal for all market conditions. When the market is moving “sideways”, employing bots that take advantage of market volatility can be extremely useful, time-saving, and anxiety-reducing. Accordingly, we’re proud to introduce our new GRID Bots on 3commas!

GRID bots employ the Grid Trading Strategy, which in contrast to most DCA and Gordon bots, works best in a ranging sideways market with no clear direction. Instead of canceling out previous gains, GRID bots take advantage of the volatility to lock in profit more effectively. The more frequent and the bigger the price fluctuations are, the more profitable the strategy will be.

GRID bots work by setting up buy and sell orders in a predefined price range, creating a grid-like formation. Choose a price range for the strategy you wish to employ and then decide how many grids you want to have within that range. By splitting your price range into a variety of smaller grids, you’re more likely to trigger a profitable trade. The more grids you make, the higher the trade frequency will be because the grid width is decreased. However, the profit earned with each order will also decrease. In effect, the user can choose to employ a strategy of placing many trades with small profit potential or fewer trades with larger profit potential.

Whenever a buy order is triggered, a new sell order will be placed (higher than the buy). Conversely, whenever a sell order is triggered, a new buy order will be placed (lower than the sell). Accordingly, whenever the price fluctuates between two grids so a trade is executed, a small amount of profit is locked in.

Here’s a few great reasons you should consider using GRID bots:

The majority of trading strategies focus around correctly predicting a trend and betting on that prediction by trading accordingly. However, more often than not, the market just has no clear trend. Thus, traders using that strategy have to wait it out and stay flat most of the time.

Fortunately, with a Grid Trading strategy, you don’t need to wait for the perfect opportunity to anticipate the next move. If the trend goes downwards you buy cheap and then cheaper; if the trend goes upwards you sell high and then higher; if it doesn’t go anywhere you buy and sell and buy and sell, making a profit from all the small fluctuations it does until it changes into a trend.

The GRID strategy employs the most basic idea of trading (buy low, sell high, earn the difference), so it can be extrapolated to fit virtually any market and successfully earn a profit, regardless of the trend or market behavior.

By choosing the price range and the number of grids, you have the potential to actively define the frequency and period of the strategy.

GRID’s can be set up for the short term, making hundreds of trades per hour to catch micro profits from all small fluctuations of a day or for the long term by choosing a huge range, allowing it to run for months to earn profit from every greater trend change.

The flexibility to choose your grid strategy gives you the ability to influence the risk/reward level even more actively than most other trading. You can choose if you want to use a GRID Bot to earn steady small profit with close to zero risks (e.g, by selecting a stablecoin pair like BUSD/USDT), or if you prefer to take bigger risks for potentially huge returns (e.g., with a low market cap coin that has high fluctuations).

With all of the amazing benefits of using GRID bots, we’re so excited to introduce a new line of products that will add versatility to our existing line of bots. Although everyone loves living in a bull market, the 3Commas team strives to insure that our users do well in any market.

The Perks of GRID Bot Trade Automation

At 3Commas, we’re always committed to providing our customers with the best trading tools to conquer one of the most difficult...

Cryptocurrency trading is a very multidimensional activity with a whole encyclopedia of terms, strategies, and concepts. If you are a beginner, we recommend you to start from the basics by studying the 3Commas trading terminal interface. This is a new section in every user’s personal account, which will help you grasp the basics of trading. Our today’s guide is dedicated to the 3commas trading terminal features and will help you effectively navigate its interface.

Let us mark the major elements of the trading terminal interface displayed on the screenshot below:

Account switching options; trading pair selection; Basic/Pro terminal mode switch; interface elements placement reset option;

Orderbook (market depth) displaying the depth of orders;

Chart of the traded asset with Tradingview tools;

Account Portfolio, Open Orders, and Trade History menu.

Below we will take a closer look at each of these elements. For now, let’s move on to the interface settings. The 3commas trading terminal offers a default setup of the interface mentioned above elements, but you can customize them to match your preferences. When you hover your cursor over the order menu, order book, chart, or trade history, the buttons will allow you to move or resize the windows and are displayed in the upper and lower corners.

Click the first button and drag the menu to a position, which you find more convenient:

For example, you can swap the order book and order placement terminal:

Or move the order book to the bottom part of the screen, freeing up extra space for the chart:

The right corner of the menu (on the top) accommodates the Reset Layout button, which restores the default interface layout.

There is a button to the right of it, which lets you disable individual interface elements: order placement terminal, order book, chart, or trade history. Here you can also click the Make a suggestion button to suggest your own additional elements to be added to the trading terminal. Please note that the terminal is still in the beta-testing stage. The Basic/Pro switch removes (or adds) certain options from the order placement terminal and order book.

Now let’s move onto the details of each interface element and look through the examples of trades using the terminal.

In this block, the user sets his order’s parameters (an order to buy or sell a coin) to be placed on the exchange. When it coincides with the opposite order at the specified price, a trade is executed. Let’s take a look at the order placing terminal in the Basic mode. The screenshot below highlights its main elements blocks:

The Trading pair and the amount of funds available for trading in every particular case. When you hover over the question mark in its right top corner, a pop-up with detailed information on the amount of funds involved in the order appears;

Type of order (Market or Limit order). The former is executed at the best price, currently available on the exchange; the latter is getting placed on an exchange and gets executed at a predetermined price;

Stop Loss button. With its help, you can immediately place a Stop Loss order, which will close your trade at a Trigger price if the price of the asset moves in the wrong direction;

Units and Total fields. Order size in cryptocurrencies from the trading pair (the screenshot shows the pair BTC/USDT, so the Units field shows bitcoins, and the Total field shows USDT);

Buy (buy asset) and Sell (sell asset) buttons.

When you switch to the limit order, you also need to set the Order price execution in the field, displayed on the screenshot below:

When using a Pro mode, advanced options are available in the order terminal in addition to those mentioned above:

The Conditional switch allows you to set more parameters for both market and limit orders. In the first case, you can set the Trigger Price level — when it is reached, the market order is automatically placed for execution;

Order size buttons. Using these, you can quickly set the size of the order (25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of available funds);

The Trailing option, as a percentage of the price change or at a certain price. We will get into details of this function below;

Timeout option (set in seconds). The Timeout option indicates the delay before the order is executed.

Below is the same menu, but for the limit order. There is no Trailing option, but we can select the order type under the already familiar Timeout menu (so far, there is only one option — Good-Till-Cancelled). According to its terms, the order will be kept in the order book until the trader cancels it.

Market depth is a list of traders’ actual requests (orders) to buy (bid) and sell (ask) an asset. Different exchanges often display the order book in different ways; the 3Commas trading platform presents it as a constantly changing table displaying the market depth.

Let’s take a closer look at the elements of the order book:

Displayed orders list management. When the first button is pressed, both sell and buy orders will be displayed, the second button leads to displaying only buy orders (green), the third — only the sell orders (red);

Sell orders list. The offers are arranged in ascending order from the lowest available price to the highest. The offers at the bottom of the list are the most profitable for the buyer. Each line consists of the order execution market price and order size in both cryptocurrencies (in this case, the second column shows order size in USDT, while the third displays the volume in bitcoins);

Buy orders list. Formed in a similar way, the most profitable price for the seller is located at the top of the list.

The red and green highlights represent the “depth” of the market — the comparative sizes of buy/sell orders.

The 3commas trading terminal displays a selected trading pair chart powered by the Tradingview platform. It has a huge number of chart setup options, saving, editing, and taking advantage of a number of technical analysis tools. We will take a closer look at the most important ones in order of their popularity. Let’s expand the chart to access a more convenient way of interacting with this tool.

In the top menu of the chart section, you can observe the following options:

Timeframe. The value that determines each candle’s time interval on the chart. For example, if you set the time frame to 1H, each candle will represent the 1H price change;

Candle. Bars, Candles, Hollow Candles, Heikin Ashi, Line, Area, or Baseline. By default, the chart is displayed in Candles;

Indicators menu allows you to add indicators to the chart;

Undo and Redo buttons to cancel or redo prior user’s actions;

Save button allows to save the chart in the cloud;

The bottom scale shows the Time (9), the scale to the right shows the Price (10).

In the side menu on the left, you can find tools for adding TA figures to the chart, rulers for price/time intervals, etc. With the (1) button, you can erase all the objects previously added to the chart. Button (2) shows the chart’s Object Tree.

When hovering your cursor over each candlestick in the upper part of the chart, you can see the opening and closing prices, maxima and minima for the selected timeframe.

The Account Portfolio, Open Orders, and your Trades History are combined in one menu. You can switch between them with the (1) tabs at the top. The Account Portfolio menu displays the coins in your account (2), their quantity (3), the change in value over the last 24 hours (4), and the market price (5).

The Open Orders menu displays all the orders you have placed so far. Let’s look at the limit order as an example:

Order Size and its execution progress in percent (Filled);

Trigger price ( the price, which will cause the order execution);

Buttons to cancel, immediately execute or renew the order.

The list of orders can be updated by pressing the green Refresh button at the menu’s bottom-left corner. There are a few page display options at the terminal’s bottom-right, allowing to choose a number of displayed orders per page (in this case, each page will show 25 orders or less).

The last tab allows you to see your trading history.

It’s time to move on from theory to practice! If you are just learning how to interact with the trading terminal, we strongly recommend you to switch to Paper Account in the top menu of the page. You can replenish the volume of virtual funds in your account settings.

Let’s begin by placing a market order using the Basic mode. Select the desired number of Units and press the Buy button.

The order is executed, and you can see it in your transactions history.

How to operate the 3commas trading terminal?

Cryptocurrency trading is a very multidimensional activity with a whole encyclopedia of terms, strategies, and concepts. If you are a...

FTX Exchange tools are now available with 3Commas!

READ MORE

Options 101 — A Worthy Consideration

The Perks of GRID Bot Trade Automation

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