Grid bot

Most hosted bot platforms in this catalogue sell grid bots, and several sell them by the unit. The word names an order-placement pattern, not a strategy with an expected result, and the numbers a grid dashboard shows are narrower than they look.

How it works

Four inputs define the grid: a lower price, an upper price, a number of grids and the capital behind them. Binance's parameter page gives the two ways to space the levels:

• Arithmetic: every gap is the same price distance, (upper − lower) / number of grids. Because the gap is fixed in price, it is a larger percentage near the bottom of the range than near the top, so profit per grid varies across the range.
• Geometric: every gap is the same ratio, (upper / lower) ^ (1 / number of grids), so each level is the same percentage above the last and profit per grid is fixed.

A sell order above the current price needs coins to sell, so a spot grid holds the base asset from its first minute. Binance's places its buy orders from the top grid down, and the ones above the market fill at once; what rests afterwards is sells above the current price and buys below it. When a buy fills, a sell goes in one level up; when that sell fills, a buy goes back in one level down. A buy and the sell that closes it are one completed grid. Bitsgap's help centre writes what one completed grid earns as the grid step minus twice the trading fee, because each round trip pays a fee on both legs.

Outside the range, nothing happens. Binance's spot grid stops executing when the price falls below the lower price or rises above the upper one, and resumes if it comes back. That is the whole of the rule, and its consequence follows from the order pattern rather than from anything the vendor adds. A price that walks down through the range fills every buy on the way, so a bot parked below its floor holds the base asset it accumulated, bought at prices above the current one. A price that walks up through the range fills every sell, so a bot parked above its ceiling holds only the quote currency. Some platforms offer trailing, which moves the range instead of stopping; each defines that rule separately.

A futures grid is the same pattern on a leveraged perpetual. The levels and the replacement logic are unchanged. What is added is margin, a liquidation price and a funding payment on whatever position the grid is carrying at each funding time.

Why it matters here

"Grid profit" is one of two numbers, and it is the smaller claim. Binance defines grid profit as the realised profit of filled buy-and-sell pairs, fees deducted, and reports floating profit separately, as the unrealised gain or loss on what the bot holds; total profit is the two added together. A grid that has bought all the way down a falling range can show a positive grid profit and a negative total at the same moment. When a platform or a screenshot quotes one figure, ask which one.

Fees are the margin. Profit per grid is the step minus two fees, so a narrow step at a taker rate can round to nothing or below it. The same arithmetic makes a backtest's fee setting decisive. OctoBot's card records that simulated fees fall back to zero when a profile omits them, and that its simulator fills a resting limit order in full the moment price touches it — the optimistic end for a pattern that is nothing but resting limit orders. Hummingbot's grid simulator treats a quote as filled when a one-minute candle closes through it. Neither models queue position.

Futures grids carry costs a spot backtest never sees. Passivbot runs grid and trailing positions on perpetuals, and its card records that nothing in the shared engine charges or credits a funding rate payment, in backtest or live accounting. Leverage also puts a liquidation price under the accumulated position, which a spot grid parked below its floor does not have. Altrady's grids run on spot only: its per-venue table has the grid futures marker off on all nineteen rows.

The unit of sale is the grid. 3Commas and Bitsgap meter bots per type, so the number of grids you may run concurrently is a plan limit: two on 3Commas' Starter, three on Bitsgap's Basic. Gunbot ships a family of grid strategies inside one licence. Hosted crypto trading bots compared works out which plan a given mix of grid and DCA bots lands on.

Nothing in the word implies a return. A grid converts price oscillation inside a range into completed round trips and converts a move out of the range into inventory or cash. Which of the two a given period produces is the market's decision, and no parameter on any card here changes that.