Three years of grid bots on Pionex and KuCoin - what I'd tell myself

GR

grid_step

Author

Original post

A grid bot is a tool, in the same way DCA is a tool. Neither one prints money.

DCA buys a fixed amount on a fixed schedule.
A grid bot averages in as price falls and averages out as it rises.

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No idea how many people here have actually run one. They are available on Pionex, Binance and KuCoin, among others, and although the features differ, the idea is the same everywhere.

Three years in, here is what I have:

If you set one up hoping it quietly makes money on its own, you are using it wrong.
DCA into something like LUNA before the collapse and your account is gone. The bot is no different. What you run it on matters more than how you configure it. Keep most of it in BTC and ETH.
On pairs, I use both stablecoin pairs like BTC/USDC and crypto pairs like ETH/BTC.
On a stablecoin pair I treat it as a way to DCA in and out for me. I like setting a deliberately wide range by hand - $6,000 to $60,000 on Bitcoin - so it averages down to the bottom of that band and out towards the top.
Keep it long term. The reason you are running a bot at all is to take your emotions out of it.
On ETH/BTC you are trading one coin against the other. This is my favourite one, because when ETH outruns BTC in a bull market the bot quietly converts ETH back into BTC. I stay fully in crypto and never sell into dollars.
KuCoin ranks bots by APY on a leaderboard. Do not copy a bot off it. Those numbers exist because the underlying asset just pumped, and that pump is not waiting for you. Most people who chase that list lose money.
Holding beats a grid bot on returns. If you can hold through the whole ride up and down without flinching, just hold.
The grid bot is for people who cannot, and it helps them stay out of their own way.
The habit here is buying high and selling low. The bot at least does the opposite.
I keep a large spreadsheet comparing what each exchange offers.

Jul 30, 2026

DC

dca_purist

Member

DCA is an investing method. What is being described here is trading. Averaging in and out is a trading strategy, and it is not DCA and not similar to it. Averaging in and out means multiple orders placed at levels you picked off a chart. DCA is a schedule: fixed amount, fixed interval, entry price irrelevant. That is the whole definition. What you are describing is something else.

Jul 30, 2026

NE

netsale Founder

Point 5 is the one I would push back on, and gently, because the rest of the
list is better than most things written about grid bots.

I ran bots for about three years, trading signals from Telegram channels
automatically with my own money. They had no emotions whatsoever. They never
moved a stop because they were nervous, never doubled up to get even, never
skipped a call because the chart looked scary. They lost money anyway. Taking
the emotion out removes one way to lose, and in my experience it is not the
expensive one. The bot did exactly what it was told, and what it was told was
wrong often enough to finish the job by itself.

Point 7 is the best thing in your post and it generalises further than KuCoin.
The same leaderboard exists for copy trading: sorted by return over a rolling
window, which means the number on the card was produced by something that has
already happened. And there is a second half to it in copy trading that grid
bots do not have — the accounts restart. Of the 1,517 copy traders we archive,
150 have had the deposit zeroed and begun a new cycle, and the headline figure
restarts with them. The month that emptied the account sits outside the window
everybody reads.

So: do not copy a bot off a leaderboard, and do not copy a trader off one
either. Same trap, different screen.

Sep 18, 2026