Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is a strategy to divide your investment across periodic buy or sell trades to get a better average entry price. This allows you to reduce the impact of volatility and price change on the overall position.

The main idea of the DCA bot is the repeated purchasing or selling of a coin in small amounts at price levels that are located evenly from each other. This approach minimizes the market impact on your open position.

You want to use the DCA bot when you need to cycle your trading with powerful technical signals and effective risk management tools, allowing you to completely automate your daily trading routine. Our DCA bot is a Swiss Army knife for automated trading, which outperforms the market on any time scale, whether you are a long-term investor or an intraday trader.

Here is a quick overview of what the DCA bot can do in particular:

When creating a DCA bot, you can choose a trading direction and open either a Long or a Short position.

Please follow our step-by-step instructions below to learn how to create and run your first Long and Short DCA bot from scratch.

To start a new DCA bot, click the [Start new bot] button in the Bots page's top menu.

From the list of all available bots, select [DCA bot]. This will reveal a new widget on the right corner of your screen where the settings of your DCA bot can be adjusted.

On the right side of your screen, a menu for creating your first DCA bot will be shown, where you can select the exchange, the pair, the strategy, the investment and set the advanced settings if you want to customize them to your strategy.

Read more about advanced settings in our article - Customize Advanced Bitsgap DCA Bot Settings.

Start by selecting an exchange and a pair. Click on the “Exchange” window to choose an exchange, then “Pair” to set the trading pair. Once this is done, move to the following step.

Choose the Long trading strategy. This bot will buy the base currency and then profit from selling it as the price increases. The profit will be accumulated in the quote currency.

Enter the total investment you would like to operate with or use the slider to specify the percentage based on your available trading balance. The Investment field shows an approximate investment in your quote and system currencies.

The Available Balance is the balance the bot will use to create new DCA orders. The bot can use a maximum of 95% of your currently available balance, and the rest is reserved to cover any trading fees taken by your exchange.

You can also customize your bot’s advanced settings in the "Manual Adjustment" section. Otherwise, your bot will be launched with the following default parameters:

You can learn more about each step in that section in our article - Customize Advanced Bitsgap DCA Bot Settings.

Backtest allows you to evaluate the bot performance based on historical data of a trading pair for a selected period. This feature may help you understand your bot's settings and optimize them for the selected trading pair.

To backtest your bot settings, click on the [Backtest] button. In the pop-up window, you will see the calculated results of the bot's work (bot profit) with the current settings for the past 30 days (by default), like in the example below.

This is the final step before launching the bot. Here you can review all the selected settings:

If changes need to be made, go back by clicking on the arrow. Otherwise, hit the [Start bot] button to get started.

To start a new DCA bot, click the [Start new bot] button in the Bots page's top menu.

From the list of all available bots, select [DCA bot]. This will reveal a new widget on the right corner of your screen where the settings of your DCA bot can be adjusted.

When the type of your future bot has been chosen, the next step is to select its settings.

Start by selecting an exchange and a pair. Click on the “Exchange” window to choose an exchange, then “Pair” to set the trading pair. Once this is done, move to the following step.

Choose the Short trading strategy. This bot will profit from buying the base currency as the price decreases. The profit will be accumulated in the base currency.

Enter the total investment value you would like to operate with, or use the slider to specify the percentage based on your available trading balance. The Investment field shows an approximate investment in your base and system currencies.

The Available Balance is the balance the bot will use to create new DCA orders. The bot can use a maximum of 95% of your currently available balance, and the rest is reserved to cover any trading fees taken by your exchange.

You can also customize your bot’s advanced settings in the Manual Adjustment section. Otherwise, your bot will get started with the default parameters as follows:

You can learn more about each step in that section in our article - Customize Advanced Bitsgap DCA Bot Settings.

Backtest allows you to evaluate the bot performance based on historical data of a trading pair for a selected period. This feature may help you understand your bot's settings and optimize them for the selected trading pair.

To backtest your bot settings, click on the [Backtest] button. In the pop-up window, you will see the calculated results of the bot's work (bot profit) with the current settings for the past 30 days (by default), like in the example below.

This is the final step before launching the bot. Here you can review all the selected settings:

If changes need to be made, go back by clicking on the arrow. Otherwise, hit the [Start bot] button to get started.

Whenever you want to adjust settings on any bot, select the bot you need and press the [Modify] button on the right-hand side.

📑 Note: Please be advised that only base order placement condition, position Take Profit & Stop Loss, and Risk Management tools can be modified on any active DCA bot.

Once all the necessary changes have been made, proceed by clicking the [Continue] button. Double-check the new settings on the bot's preview page and press [Confirm].

To close a DCA bot, select the one you need, and navigate the mouse cursor to the [Close] icon.

On your right-hand side, you will see a panel with your bot's current status and options for closing the bot.

DCA Long:

DCA Short:

After deciding how you want to close your bot, press the [Confirm] button. This will initiate the process of shutting your bot down.

To restart a closed DCA bot, go to the [Spot history] tab.

Select the bot you prefer and click the [Modify and Restart] button.

Adjust the settings if needed, and proceed to the bot's preview tab. Double-check all the parameters again and start a bot by pressing [Start bot].

However, when restarting a bot, the system offers you to invest the same amount of the base/quote currency that was chosen for the closed bot. In case the available trading balance is insufficient, the system will generate an error that suggests you adjust the total investment.