I have been writing my own trading bots for about three years or so, maybe a little less, all told. But exclusively on crypto exchanges. I think most people familiar with crypto could see the latest bubble for what it was, but I did manage to get out before it popped and I've been giving it some cooldown time since. I typically do trade off the volatility. I've put many hours in front of the exchanges (and put a ton of quarters in the machine, so to speak), just watching it like television, and this is the way I learned my strategies (incidentally this is the same exact way I taught myself about networking, by watching tcpdump and ethereal/wireshark). I can do pretty well if the volatility is fairly even. I do end up losing a big chunk of gains when there's too much fluctuation. I've got failsafes in the form of floor/ceiling prices at which my bots pull the cord, but this ends up being pretty expensive and is one of the main ways I end up losing steady gains. I absolutely never trade on margin. I see it as a puzzle, as a kind of game, and the challenge is a substantial part of the reward for me. I will also warn you that pretty much all the rules change once you start trading enough to make the price move locally. It's almost a whole different ballgame. And at least with crypto, it's fairly obvious that most of the trades on the exchanges are people doing the same thing you're doing. You get to know "people" by their patterns of trade.