A bot for Binance that uses Bollinger Bands strategies to make money. It was made in three days in a hackathon from my internship at TORA Trading Services.
- The demo is sped up from 30 minutes to showcase its functionality.
- The buy/sell percentage is set up to 0.1% in this video.
demo.mp4
To make money.
Jokes aside: The main theme for this hackathon was to do anything we want with Binance/Kraken's APIs and to have REST with Java, so to do an application with crypto currencies. I have always wanted to try creating a bot for trading, and I thought: what better time than know?
The first challenge was the fact that I didn't know anything about trading, not a single term. So, for my first task, I reserved some of my time to learn some terms. After that, I searched what I needed to know for a trading bot. Then I found a keyword: TRADING STRATEGIES.
The next Google search was "What is the easiest trading strategy to learn?" and the answer was: Bollinger Bands strategy. I had no idea at that time what those words meant, and the internet didn't help, since there were a lot of new terms...especially because the strategy's idea is BUY HIGH SELL LOW, which is the opposite of what you should always do in trading. Also, these strategies usually work for stocks, not crypto, since crypto is very unpredictable.
Fortunately, I found a (video)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G9fHBEsauE] explaining much better the strategy. I also found a lot of videos showing in Python how this strategy should be implementing, using different libraries, and I merged them. As a database for my transactions, I chose PostgreSQL.
So in my first day, I had the python code ready.
The most difficult part in day 2 was to create a process from java that calls the python script and is always running until I stop it. I spent a lot of hours only to find out that I had multiple versions of python on my laptop and I didn't call the right one. After some configurations, I managed to repair the setup for python and make the calling of the script work.
The backend was made with java using SpringBoot. I searched on the internet other ideas, and after some coding I had an endpoint for starting/stoping the bot and some other endpoints that collected some data from the Binance API that I has to use them the next day.
Day 3 was about building the frontend and having a presentable website for showcase. The challenge here was to find a goos library for showing live data of a crypto currency. I also added some extra APIs in the backend since I had extra time.
It was a fun challenge and I learned a lot in these 3 days, besides how to work with websockets in python and with external APIs:
- work with small steps
- better refactor in the beginning than when it's too late
- do research at the start so you don't have to erase everything because of lack of knowledge.
Will I continue on this bot? Yes, I want to, but after I finish my last year of university and after I learned more about trading.