Okay here's my tuppence on the matter. For the record I am a Gunbot user (and reseller), which of course some of you will know is one of the more well known and popular bots on the forum.
There's some very misinformed comments on this thread, so I'd like to share my honest experiences and demystify them.
1) Firstly, no bot is just a "Turn it on and it will make you rich" push button solution. If you're looking for that, then the answer doesn't exist, or you're asking the wrong question.
2) A number of people have correctly observed it's a very effective way to automate trades you would normally take, or trades you may not see because you are away or asleep. Bots can work 24/7 unlike a human being.
3) Whether you can make better decisions than a bot on a single trade, the answer is of course you could, but only if you have the right experience, a good feel for the market, TA analysis, a good risk management strategy etc.
4) I think it's just as misinformed to tell people that they can make better decisions than a bot, when that person is a newbie. If they are a newbie, they are probably unlikely to make good decisions bot or not- I recommend you demo trade as much as possible read about price action, chart patterns technical analysis etc etc before you use real money if you're a newbie.
5) Using Gunbot has taught me so much, and has made me a better manual trader too. Because I watched how it observes the market and its buys and sells, and that includes when it gets it wrong because I then make a settings adjustment if I see it's not just a fluke error. I have now setup Gunbot to trade the way I would manually, which is to look for a pullback or market bottom and then sell on the rebound. When I first started using Gunbot, I took my time because I wasn't prepared to lose money. Not everyone who uses Gunbot succeeds but mainly because they have the wrong attitude, expectations, or haven't actually taken it seriously to sit down and learn... not because Gunbot doesn't work. Gunbot does work, but you have to understand the settings, what they do, how to have different settings for different coins according to volatility or price action/ pump and dump stage, market conditions etc. Early on I was eager to learn from some long time users of Gunbot and had my questions answered and I'm comfortable knowing it quite well and how to use it.
-I set my bots trading balance to use no more than 5-10% of capital on the exchange for single trade, this is exactly how I would manual trade
-I trade very cautiously and have got Gunbot to closely mimick that, in that I tend to buy at the lower end of a long ish wick on a red candle where it's at the extreme of the lower bolllinger band and will rebound.
-I asked lots of questions and wasn't prepared to go live until I had them answered
-The bot is a better trader than me in the sense that I have automated what I do normally and it does it with consistency and without emotion.
Feel free to ask me any other questions, or send me a private message. I've been advising people how to integrate Gunbot into a trading strategy or make it work (see my contributions on the official Gunbot thread for more about what I know and how I use it especially the last dozen pages or so where I feature prominently).
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1715214.2980
