Bitcoin Accumulation Strategy

[TradingWithABot]

Hi everyone,

I’m happy to contribute to this community. The first topic I’d like to share is my approach to accumulating Bitcoin over time. This strategy is the result of a lot of thought and experimentation. In this post, I’ll share the main concepts, and later, I’ll explain how to implement some of these ideas using Gainium.

When it comes to accumulating BTC, here are the approaches I focus on:

1. Scheduled Regular Purchases
A straightforward method—buy BTC at regular intervals (daily, weekly, monthly) for a fixed amount, like 50 USDT.

2. Regular Purchases with a DCA Grid
Build on the above by adding a DCA “grid” below your base order. This approach automatically adds to your position during price dips, lowering your average cost.

Note that in both of these approaches, 1 and 2, we buy but do not sell. Our goal is to buy and hold here.

3. Trading BTC Pairs
Trade pairs like ETH/BTC or SOL/BTC. Instead of taking profits in USDT, profits are credited in BTC, directly increasing your holdings over time.

4. Using BTC Collateral on Inverse Futures
Hold BTC as collateral while trading on inverse perpetual contracts. This way, profits remain in BTC, and you grow your stack.

5. BTC Collateral with Leveraged Multi-Asset Accounts
On exchanges with Universal or Multi-Asset accounts (e.g. Bybit, Binance, OKX), you can use BTC as collateral for leveraged trading on other pairs. The profits (earned in USDT or other tokens) can be regularly converted back into BTC to accumulate further.

These 5 approaches form a solid and well-rounded starting point for accumulating Bitcoin.

I’ve tested all of these approaches to varying degrees, often using a mix depending on the market and my goals. For example, I combine regular accumulation (e.g., DCA) with strategies that leverage BTC collateral on Futures.

Before we go into the discussion of the set-up and configuration of bots, which will follow below, I’m curious about is your take—have you tried any of these methods, or do you have your own approaches to accumulating Bitcoin?

As mentioned, over time I will be sharing setups / results in follow-up posts in this thread, so also feel free to share your feedback or ask questions.

[Iamtheonewhoknockss]

Daily buys at same time
Simple stupid effective.

[aressanch]

I do 1. And 2. For 3 I don’t like trading btc pairs because btc has been the strongest crypto in the bull run we don’t know when alt season will begin. 4 and 5 for the risk tolerant, I prefer spot

[TradingWithABot]

To continue: Bot Links and Screenshots

1. Scheduled Regular Purchases

From the Trading Bots menu, we start a New DCA Bot, but for this first strategy, there will be no DCA (no Safety Orders).

https://app.gainium.io/bot/67704bf12759feba51f8dc20?a=14&aid=share-bot&share=dbcbfecc-b28c-4541-8fea-4504761be16a

The Deal Start condition is straightforward: Time-based.

You’ll need to specify your purchase amount—let’s say you want to spend 50 USDT per trade. In the Deal Start condition, you also set the frequency. For instance, you could:

• Buy 50 USDT worth of Bitcoin every 7 days, or
• Buy 7.14 USDT daily.

From my testing, more frequent purchases tend to perform better over time.

Backtesting

Even with just one regular purchase per week and no Safety Orders, this strategy already showed profitability—at least during 2024. Here’s the backtest result for reference:

Exploring Alternatives

I also experimented with another Deal Start condition: ASAP Mode combined with the Cooldown After Deal Start feature. The idea was to replicate the same 7-day interval between purchases. However, when I backtested this setup, it didn’t trigger recurring buys as I expected. This could be due to how the feature is designed or potentially a bug.

Additional Notes

• For this strategy, Take Profit is disabled since the goal is purely to accumulate Bitcoin without selling at all.
• Gainium also offers price filters, which I plan to explore further in future posts.

[Brandon]

1. I’ve been buying a certain amount of BTC every week for the past few years through Swan.

2. I use BTC as collateral for my bots on 1x leverage. I trade inverse futures to continue to stack my BTC.

I’ll do this more aggressively with shorts in the next 12 months and It makes more sense to use inverse perpetuals in a bear market.

[TradingWithABot]

2. Regular Purchases with a DCA Grid

Building on the first strategy, let’s now add a DCA grid to the bot. For each of our weekly purchases, we’ll include 3 Safety Orders alongside the base order.

https://app.gainium.io/bot/677120a52759feba510ab111?a=14&aid=share-bot&share=1e4069cc-eb9f-4736-9800-c1c6d64d3d4f

Initial Setup

For simplicity, we’ll start with these settings:

• Price Deviation: 5%
• Volume Scale: 1
• Step Scale: 1

This means the Safety Orders will trigger at 5% intervals below the base order price. Here’s how it looks in the setup:

Improved ROI

Even with these basic settings, the return on investment is improved compared to the previous “flat” purchase strategy. While the first approach gave us a 51.46% ROI, adding a DCA grid boosts it to over 60%.

When I reviewed the deals history, I noticed that many deals utilized all 3 Safety Orders, completing all 4/4 orders.

Managing Capital Requirements

As you may have noticed on the second screenshot, the Required Total is 10,408 USDT, which can be significant capital for many of us. However, utilizing the Smart Orders feature in the DCA section ensures that for each weekly deal, the DCA grid places one Safety Order at a time rather than locking in capital for all 3 orders upfront. This reduces the required total to 5,201 USDT.

Even with this adjustment, it’s understandable that this is still a large capital requirement. Here are a few suggestions to make it more manageable:

1. Reduce order sizes: Consider lowering the Base Order and Safety Order amounts from 50 USDT to 5 USDT, as many exchanges allow such small order sizes for Bitcoin.
2. Fund gradually: You don’t need the entire amount in your account upfront. Instead, add USDT to your balance weekly or monthly, ensuring the bot has enough for its next set of purchases or to cover price dips.

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Experiment and Adapt

To do

Here’s a challenge for you - see if you can achieve better results. Tweak the DCA settings and backtest the strategy for the full year of 2024.

Enhanced Stats

I noticed, while reviewing the bot’s performance that couldn’t find anywhere in the Stats section things like:

1. The total average price of Bitcoin accumulated.
2. The total amount of BTC purchased or the total USDT spent over time.

@aressanch, Am I overlooking something, or is this data not available? It would be very helpful to have it.

[aressanch]

We don’t tipically get asked for those stats, most people is not using an accumulation strategy so they don’t really care. When you run the backtest it will tell you the open pnl. If you didn’t have a tp, you can easily calculate the average price based on it. You can also go to the trades section and export the list to analyze on a spreadsheet.

[d_yo_r]

Per pair there can only be a limited number of active orders. Without any closing conditions there won’t be new deals when the limit has been reached.

[TradingWithABot]

Not sure what you mean. Where is the limitation you’re speaking of? In Gainium or on an exchange? A weekly-buy bot would have at most 52 open orders, but in reality less, because SOs would be consumed on many of the weekly buys.

Anyway, as one would run it on Spot, then the bot could be Stopped without selling the Bitcoin, and the accumulated BTC would just stay in your Assets.

[d_yo_r]

Usually exchanges have limits on the number of open orders per pair, such as 200 at Binance. Of course, with 52 deals there will only be a maximum of 52 orders at any time - base or safety. Currently only your configuration at Gainium would stop your bot from opening deals after about a year, if you don’t cancel open orders regularly.

[TradingWithABot]

Yep. The configuration I proposed is a weekly-buy bot that would run for 1 year. After that, a new instance of a bot could be opened. I think there’s not much to argue about within this particular element of the strategy, i.e. having a large number of open orders, although it is somewhat of a work-around to ‘value averaging’.

Example of Value Averaging

For the example above, suppose the goal is for the portfolio to increase by $1,000 every quarter. If in a quarter’s time, the assets have grown to $1,250 (based on the 100 shares in Q1 multiplied by Q2 price of $12.50), the investor will fund the account with $750 ($2,000 - $1250) worth of assets. Q2 purchase of $750 divided by a share price of $12.50 will buy 60 additional shares, bringing the total to 160 shares. 160 shares x $12.50=$2,000 value for Q2.

In the following quarter, the goal would be to have account holdings of $3,000. This pattern continues to be repeated in the following quarter, and so on.

This is taken from this article on Investopedia. So, in Value Averaging we end up buying more when the price is lower, almost as a side-effect of our goal to continue increasing our portfolio by a certain amount each investment period.

But here’s an even tricker part of the VA, if we ever to automate it. If/when a period’s profit is larger than set as a target, a portion of the asset would be sold, thus replenishing your liquidity for the times when the asset’s price drops.

[d_yo_r]

The DCA approach of the article refers to the classical time based buying of the same amount approach. I would in contrast probably use smaller and smaller order size above the deal’s current average price and increasing DCA orders below it; to prevent the deal to turn into a s loss or respectively get the deal closed quicker.

The Value Averaging looks like an interesting twist of classical DCA orders even though it only adds time based, too.

Regarding the example, I would expect that there is also an example where classical DCA outperforms VA.

[TradingWithABot]

Let’s move on to the third approach: trading coin pairs against BTC.

3. Trading BTC Pairs

As Ares mentioned above (and as many of us know from the experience), trading a coin against BTC can be just as risky as trading it against USDT—if not riskier. BTC has a strong tendency to increase in value over time, while USDT, pegged to the US dollar, faces inflationary pressures.

There are brief periods when coins like ETH or DOGE outperform BTC, showing an uptrend. But these moments are typically short-lived. When considering a bot to trade ETH/BTC or DOGE/BTC, the common approach is to set it to ASAP mode with multiple SOs.

Here’s an example from my trading DOGE/BTC via 3Commas:

Again, these uptrending slopes are rare, meaning there will be moments when the bot takes profit in BTC during these spikes, followed by longer periods of waiting.

However, we can improve upon this strategy by refining the Deal Start condition instead of defaulting to ASAP mode. For instance, implementing a QFL strategy.

Here’s a bot with this approach:

https://app.gainium.io/bot/6775928e2759feba51dc4a51?a=14&aid=share-bot&share=6340b4be-f319-41f7-b77e-c3056e54a2c6

Backtesting a month of December 2024, there were only 3 deals done, but the results were positive: minimal drawdown, no open negative PnL, and a small but meaningful ROI.

For me, this strategy complements the goal of Bitcoin accumulation. It adds an extra few percent per month on top of the BTC you’re already holding—steady growth with reduced risk.

In summary
Yes, trading against BTC carries its own risks, but with a well-configured Deal Start Condition and careful coin selection, it can become a reliable tool to grow your BTC holdings.

[MarkusP]

intressting. would it not make sence to have a short bot when there is most of the time a downtrend.

[TradingWithABot]

A short ETH/BTC bot on Spot, you mean?

[MarkusP]

Yes, when you consider that most of the time there is a downtrend compared to BTC why not create a short version of it.

[TradingWithABot]

I think it can be a good idea. I will check.
The reason I did not even think about it, is because of the initial scenario where we hold BTC, and trade and take profit in BTC. To run a short bot on ETH/BTC, we would also take profit in BTC, but we would need to have an initial and a good amount of ETH as well to sell it off and re-buy it. So the portfolio would contain both ETH + BTC. But let me look into it, thank you, Markus.

[aressanch]

I also prefer short bots against usdt, they have more liquidity and more volatility, which is what’s needed for most strategies.