Corn-Bot v1.0 — A passive income strategy for the Zen Trading community.
It’s been a journey, to say the least for us all over the past 12 months. We have all lived through the ups & downs of what the Cryptocurrency market has thrown at us. However, as the saying goes;
“IF THERE IS NO STRUGGLE, THERE IS NO PROGRESS” — FREDERICK DOUGLASS
As such, it has been an imperative of mine to build a community that embraces the struggle, blocks out the noise, and embodies the true spirit of resilience through the ethos of Zen. Not necessarily from a Buddhist perspective, but;
a state of calm attentiveness in which one’s actions are guided by intuition rather than by conscious effort…
Many in the community have enjoyed our collective partition away from the Spot market and towards DeFi. The discovery of certain Layer-1 chains (Fantom, Avalanche & Telos but to name a few…) has brought a level of deep value and opportunity to the Discord that we hadn’t seen prior and long may that continue.
However, I do believe that Bitcoin has a major role to play in the world of DeFi & TradeFi in addition to its Store of Value (SoV) characteristics. Looking at the user interaction with $BTC on Coinbase, even as far back as 2015, we can see that the ‘old corn 🌽’ has moved away from being a Medium of Exchange (MoE) to a SoV:
The next evolution for Bitcoin’s SoV will be to utilize your position far more extensively as collateral than as a means of exchange. As Raul Paul puts it, Bitcoin is “pristine collateral”. We will need to explore the advantages of collateral in a separate post (folding strategies and so forth), but for now, at least think of Bitcoins application in these two parts, SoV & collateral.
So the implication here is, we need to ‘stack sats’. How do we do it?
Corn-Bot of course! A multi-faceted algorithmic trading bot that you can easily follow with one click of a button. Rather than write a lengthy post on all the aspects of the bot, I’ll do my best here to neatly present it in an FAQ:
1. What is the strategy behind the bot?
The bot employs a variety of custom-built scripts of my very own that incorporate strategies from traditional price-action techniques all the way to financial mathematics in order to model and find inefficiencies in Bitcoin markets. There could be up to 7 different types of strategies employed at any given time to find these opportunities and trade them accordingly.
2. What is the main goal of the bot?
The bot is designed to arbitrage Altcoins against Bitcoin. Essentially, through the use of varied techniques, the aim is to buy Altcoins that are asymmetrical in performance to Bitcoin at a given moment and to sell those Altcoins back into Bitcoin in order to continue to accumulate more BTC.
3. Where can I follow the bot?
Each time the bot opens a trade or sells back into BTC, an alert will be sent to the Zen Trading discord server. You will be able to follow the trades in real-time.
4. Is there a copy trading option?
Yes, there is. At present, we will be using Shrimpy (Binance) until the community has successfully moved to a new platform. We are still investigating our options here, but for the moment the bot will run on Shrimpy.
5. Have you backtested the strategies at all?
Yes, each bot that is deployed to the portfolio undergoes a rigorous testing regime that includes the following:
- Back-testing & Walk-Forward optimization across an average of 1,500 trades
- Trading the bot in real-time on a separate account before deploying it live
- All strategies must have a Sharpe ratio near to 1.0 & a Sortino Ratio greater than 2.0 to qualify
6. Do I need a stop loss?
This is a matter of priority. If you’re in the camp of 1BTC=1BTC, then my answer would be no. Each strategy has entry/exit criteria and therefore by nature has stop-loss/take-profit baked into it. However, if you’re in the camp of 1BTC = Fiat of choice, then I would recommend you to use a stop-loss or at least take your profits to fiat. I personally believe that defeats the purpose of investing in Bitcoin, but I am not one to determine the path you take.
7. How long does each trade hold the altcoin on average before selling back into BTC?
This varies depending on the strategy, but usually, they are held at a minimum for half a day to a few days at a time.
8. What benchmarks do you consider worthy to beat to consider the bot viable?
- Inflation (this goes without saying)
- The most sustainable/secure single staking opportunity for $BTC (something like Yearn, which offers 13% APY)
9. Will the bot trade 24hours a day, 7 days a week?
No. The bot will be open from Monday to Friday, at the open/close of the London Stock Exchange.
The London Stock Exchange is open Monday through Friday from 8:00am to 4:30pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT+00:00).
At the close of the market on Friday, all open trades will be converted back to BTC.
10. How do I best use my time with the bot over the weekend?
Since weekends are usually low volume environments, and the portfolio will be 100% in BTC you have at your disposal the opportunity to use this time to:
- Dollar-Cost Average
- Take profits from the PF (if this is important to you)
11. Is there a spreadsheet / Dollar Cost Average tracker to be used alongside the bot?
Yes. Please follow the link below to a Google Sheet I have prepared that is an all-in-one tracker. You will need to ‘Make a Copy’ to allow the sheet to be editable on your own.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12rWYFbr77RE-LQyp__S8MiQ84UeU4HwDqmqnLbz-Bd0/edit?usp=sharing
I will field questions about the spreadsheet in the Discord. Please note that the sheet is open source. I’ve only built the first iteration. It is up to you to make it better :)
12. When will the bot become live?
Fingers crossed, the bot will be released hopefully, Monday 28th March.
13. When lambo?
ASAP ;)
That’s all from me for now, see you in the server for any further questions.
J.