My Trading Bot in action - ETC madness on Poloniex!

I captured this video a few days ago, during the most insane Ethereum Classic volatility spike on Poloniex.

At one point, the arbitrage between markets was so extreme that my bot was able to make 13 bitcoins within a couple of seconds!

I spent the rest of the day shaking, glued to the screen, watching more profits slowly roll in. I made more trading profits on that day than I had made in the last 4 months.

At one point during the day, the bot went into "panic mode" as it suddenly had a huge amount of ETH in its balance that it was unable to sell. The Poloniex API was throwing errors, which sometimes happens when the site is under high load, processing margin calls or whatever it is doing that makes it unresponsive. Thankfully I was able to sell at a small loss a few minutes later.

A little bit of backstory:

The bot you are seeing is part of a framework of arbitraging bots that I've been working on for the past couple of months. When I saw ETC being added to Poloniex, I was in a rush to improve my code. The most important change, allowing the bot to automatically recover from a failed trade, was deployed just a few hours before the video. It was scary to run this barely tested code. Coding mistakes have cost me money in the past, both in lost profit opportunities and in actual losses. I should really set up proper testing frameworks, just haven't had the time to do so.

I was very lucky to run the right strategy at the right time, with the right amount of capital, and with (apparently) no competition from other bots whatsoever.

At the time of writing, ETC volatility has decreased, trading volume has decreased, and competition from other bot makers seems to be coming in. The profits from this strategy are now just pennies. It was fun while it lasted though!

How have you guys been doing trading ETC? Right now is for sure a very interesting time to be a trader. :)