If you’re still manually trading crypto in 2025, you’re either incredibly sharp, slightly unhinged—or maybe a bit of both. And honestly, I respect that.
Let’s not sugarcoat it: you’re up against machines. Not the friendly, beeping kind—these are ultra-fast, hyper-efficient trading algorithms that sniff out arbitrage and scalp every fraction of a percent across spot and futures markets all day, every day. By the time your TradingView chart loads, they’ve already flipped a trade between Binance and OKX.
When it comes to strategies like cash-and-carry arbitrage, funding rate plays, or exploiting small price dislocations, bots are king. They’re built to be fast, emotionless, and brutally efficient.
But that’s where you have the edge.
Bots don’t do nuance. They don’t feel when funding rates are about to swing because retail is blindly piling into some hype coin. They can’t decide to skip the hedge and hold spot because something in the air tells you a short squeeze is brewing.
They don’t sense panic. You do.
So while machines might own the numbers, humans still own the chaos—the unpredictable, emotional pockets of the market where logic breaks down and gut instinct can actually win. Whether you’re in spot or futures, trading manually or with bots, remember: speed matters, but sometimes the real edge is knowing when to go off-script.