Three spot bot strategies, and what they refuse to be

Captay is willing to describe three spot behaviors and unwilling to describe a fourth that guesses the next price. DCA paces buys. A grid quotes a range. Rebalance defends a mix of weights. Each one can lose money while doing exactly what it was told. None of them is armed, because the cabinet that would run them is closed.

What they share

All three are long-only spot. They do not borrow, they do not short, and they do not move coins off the exchange. Each one is wrapped in the same outer limits: capital share, position size, drawdown, and daily loss. The strategy can propose an order. The limit can veto it. That veto is the product, more than the arithmetic inside any one rule.

They also share a silence. Captay does not rank them, does not publish a winner, and does not tell you which market regime you are in. If you want a rule that announces it has beaten a buy-and-hold alternative, you will not find that sentence on this site.

What they answer to

• DCA answers to a clock and a budget. Time passing is the signal, not a chart pattern.
• A grid answers to distance inside a box you drew. It is busy when price oscillates and exposed when price trends.
• Rebalance answers to drift. It sells what grew too large in the mix and buys what shrank, including a cash sleeve if you gave cash a weight.

What they are not

They are not copy trading. There is no leader account, no signal room, and no hidden book you are invited to follow. They are not a yield product: nothing here rents your coins or pays you for locking them. They are not high-frequency and they are not cross-exchange arbitrage. They are not a discretionary desk that will override the rule because someone felt the tape change.

They are also not a managed account. Reading these pages does not appoint Captay to decide for you. When a cabinet exists, you would still be the person who arms a rule and the person who can delete the key. Until then, you are a reader.

Two rules can trip each other

A grid and a DCA schedule on the same coin both accumulate inventory. A rebalance that wants to sell the same coin will fight that inventory. The design note is simple and easy to ignore: overlapping rules are your configuration problem, not a hidden optimizer that reconciles them. Turning one off does not unfill the other. The journal, later, should show both streams so you can see the collision. It cannot show it today.