This is a redditor explaining how he and his bots trade bitcoin, taken from a long Reddit thread: His bots: "To preface this I'll say that I'm a systems programmer and mathematician, and my interest in writing the bots is as much academic interest in analyzing the market as it is financial. That said I have four main types of bots, and each bot has it's own amount of btc to use. The first type of bot is a long term trend trading bot that uses ema, and price/ema crossings to make buy and sell decisions. These aren't that helpful right now as in a hype cycle things move to fast, but they are helpful during slow periods. Second bot is a bot manipulator bot. When I have limit orders placed on a large or low volume spread between ask and sell price, these bots will place 0.01 orders tiny distances above or below the price in order to start leading bots to my limit order. Third bot is an arbitrage bot. It buys and sells fixed amounts on different exchanges based on fluctuations in price. I haven't used this one in a while because the price spread has been pretty consistent lately. The fourth bot implements stop orders and trailing stops on exchanges that don't have that functionality built in. It also analyzes the market, creates interpolating functions, numerically calculates derivatives to analyze rates of change, and uses a number of tools to try and identify trend reversals. Then it sends me email digests. All the bots are written as a windows service in C# and run on one of my servers. As to their worth, it really depends. The most important one to me is the one that implements trailing and stop orders." ----------------------------- His trading views: " Unfortunately I don't have an alert recommendation because I wrote my own program to analyze the market and send alerts. I wrote this program before there were really good options out there and haven't had reason to change. As for btc's per trade, it really depends on how certain I am about the next trend. During the Chinese bull run to 2600 cny I sold 100% near $350 usd on all exchanges, because I was extremely confident that there would be a serious dip. For other trades I will use anywhere from 5-20 btc, or setup trailing buys or sells with staggered amounts. The main thing is to shop around for exchanges with the lowest fees (that are reputable), or work to generate high 30 day volume to get lower fees. That allows you to make profit on smaller fluctuations. Another thing is to watch all the major exchanges, including MtGox, Bitstamp, and btcchina. Oftentimes you will see a sudden large shift up or down hit one exchange and you will see a damped version of that move happen on the others starting 30-90 seconds later. This gives you a heads up. I've often times seen a sudden dip or surge on Gox and put in orders on stamp, bfx, and btcchina and timed a $10 fluctuation right, which adds up after a while. As far as what % of btc to trade vs hold, it depends on your comfort with the market, but honestly you really need at least 5 btc to make enough money on the fluctuations to make the money worth it. Honestly, my recommendation is you start trading on paper, without actual money. Once you get a feel for the market then start with small amounts and work your way up. Another really important thing is to keep a clear head. It's easy to get caught up in group think. A few days ago a 10k sell wall popped up on Gox and people had all sorts of wild ideas about why it was there. I posted several times saying it just looked like someone who wanted to actually sell, and not manipulate the price or send messages and I had a lot of people argue otherwise. Well, before long the order got bought up, not pulled or moved, etc... The point being, don't read too much into the market, keep a clear head, and challenge all of your beliefs." ---------------------------------------------------- Other views: "Lots of people jumping on the anti day trading platform here, on /r/BitcoinMarkets of all places. To keep perspective I made 9 btc the last 3 days trading on the fluctuations. I've also had periods I've made bad decisions and lost money (or just failed to capitalize on an opportunity), but overall I am up substantially from where I was when I started. That said, I'm reasonably well versed in markets, I wrote my own trading bots, and use accounts across all the major exchanges, bank accounts in multiple countries, and leverage some of the more advanced trading features. It's work to setup, but once in place isn't that hard to manage. I don't obsess about price changes constantly, only when there is enough volatility to make decent money on, and I have alerts that let me know about that if I'm not watching. I'm not writing this to brag, but to provide a clear counterpoint that it is possible to make money trading on these fluctuations if you keep your emotions in check and don't get greedy. Most people who write about the horrors of day trading are usually people who panic sell, trade emotionally, and don't leverage bots or advanced trading features. If you are interested in day trading I highly recommend people look at these features rather than relying on manually doing all the work." -------------------------