Anyone here into order book trading?

Is anyone still using the order book to trade Bitcoin these days? I'm trying to decide if I should build a trading bot for that. I've been noticing that the spot BTC liquidity is all over the place on different exchanges, which opens up chances to take on those lazy market makers. What do I mean by that? Take a look at the order book screenshot from Cryptomus. You can see the market maker isn't even bothering to hide their position. They’re obviously betting on a price drop and just waiting to scoop up every buy order. And then a minute later, bam, price just crashes.

People used to follow orderbooks so much, especially orderbook depth, but they are not reliable as the orders can be cancelled at any time and with the advent of trading bots it even becomes worse. Have you noticed that when you place limit orders at the very top of the bids or bottom of the asks, there is always another order that is immediately created right after yours?

Am sure you will find a lot of order book traders here who trade a significant amount of Bitcoin specifically off the open order book and such an activity is called 'over the counter trading, OTC. This OTC method is used mainly by large institutional pocket holders who prefer to execute non disruptive trades and deal on large volume of transactions as compared to small pocket traders. It makes sense to think of building a bot to trade on the public books  if you are a developer with brains, because they are still a sure and very available channel for retail and the more algorithmic tradings.

I don't think you do need to build a bot since crypto exchanges nowadays have bots; for example, for spot trading, they have grid bots or DCA bots. Those market makers usually use order books to buy and sell. Usually they use a grid bot on a built-in tool from exchanges; it is way safer than using a bot outside the exchange. So I don't think someone here would use your bot unless it's open source.

Just use a market order. The most important thing is that the order book signals are reliable and actually play out. I've noticed a specific pattern on Cryptomus: a market maker will place a very large order right at the best price, and immediately after, the price of BTC takes off. It's been easy money. I've taken 30 trades based on this setup, and 25 of them have been in profit. I'm not saying this happens on every exchange; you have to find a specific platform where this works. For me, I found it on Cryptomus. Will it work tomorrow? I have no idea, but it's working right now

Trading order is really a 90% win rate for me. Once liquidity zones are identified, I certainly look at the order book to open positions. Also, I try to identify MM wallets and track their activities.Why wallet tracking is good is liquidity depth is different across different exchanges so MM on an exchange with low liquidity may not significantly affect the price except you're trading on the big exchanges like Binance, HL, BG, etc.

90% win rate is wild, ain't really sure there is any trading strategy with 90% win rate, Although the fact that you wait for liquidity zones to be taken out before your entry makes it a very impressive strategy but up to 90% means you have almost no loss. Sounds unrealistic to me brother, even as you wait for liquidity to be taken out your oder block can still be liquidity most times and because huge institutions knows that there are traders waiting ro take oders from there, so they also liqudate oder blocks as well but not all the time tho, oder block strategy is a good one but not 90% win rate

You’re right — on smaller exchanges, market makers can’t really influence the price. But that’s exactly where the opportunity is. Since MMs are pros who know what they’re doing, tracking their moves in the order book can actually be profitable.

Bro, I actually studied scalping seriously and even placed in the top 20 in a few trading competitions. So yeah, that kind of win rate isn’t that crazy for me. But of course, there are a lot of nuances behind trading like that — a lot of them.

Used to try it during my forex days, and then also during the orderbook DEX days in crypto (does anyone remember that lol). Never really worked for me, win some lose some, usually lose a lot of time so I gave up just like every other strat. AI probably could work with it better tho if you can teach it to monitor and try. But it'll always eventually fail.

You're right. Order book trading has its limitations in terms of time and volume. It requires investment in infrastructure, and you're guaranteed to take losses from bot bugs, unstable internet, or the exchange's own stability issues. If you have the capital, it's just better to focus on medium-term and long-term strategies.

And this is all assuming that the platform is transparent with their orderbook. We all know this is never the case not in 30 years of exchanges crypto forex or otherwise. The only thing you can trust is onchain DEX orderbooks but those aren't popular anymore and they also suffer from latency issues, not to mention block congestion.

You’re confusing the order book with volume statistics. Crypto exchanges did inflate trading volumes using market makers — that’s true — but it doesn’t interfere with order book–based trading strategies. In fact, it can even work to their advantage.

You may be right, but many forex platforms were accused with faking entries in orderbooks / spoofing. So I'm not just talking about volume. Bitfinex was kinda famous back then (also Bittrex) for spoofing, having those weird long orderlines that would disappear as soon as they were about to be reached, or that would disappear and reappear with a new price in the blink of an eye. And it was theorized that it was possible for an exchange to simply edit and add/remove orders, or simply add fake orders that would never fill, just to make it look attractive. With onchain DEX, you can't spoof, if all the network is working properly.