Short answer. It hasn't, and it's still running. I opened a XAUT/USDT futures grid on Bybit on 2026-05-25. As of 2026-08-04 it's on day 71, it's down 41.34%, and it has closed zero profitable trades. I didn't pick the range by feel — I optimised it against past data. It still needs a 4–5% move to close a single level, and that hasn't happened once.
| n | 1 run. One exchange, one symbol, one configuration, one continuous run. A single case, not a sample. |
|---|---|
| Period | 2026-05-25 to now. Day 71 as of 2026-08-04. Still open. |
| Instrument | XAUT/USDT perpetual futures, grid, Long |
| Exchange | Bybit |
| Leverage | 8x |
| Grids | 5 |
| Fees | Not stated yet — I haven't confirmed my own maker/taker tier on this account. |
| Excluded | Nothing stated yet. |
On 2026-05-25 I opened a grid on XAUT/USDT futures. Long, 8x.
I didn't pick the range by feel. I optimised it against past data, with an AI, and the target was P&L — I asked for the range that would have made the most money. I used the number that came out.
That's the part I keep coming back to. It wasn't a guess.
Then I split that range into five grids. Five grids means each level sits roughly 4–5% from the next one — 4.99% near the bottom of the range, 3.99% near the top. They aren't identical, because the steps are evenly spaced in price, not in percent, so the same step is a bigger percentage when price is lower.
So for one level to buy and then sell, price has to travel four to five percent, in one direction, inside my range, and come back. Not once in seventy-one days has that happened.
Here's the part I can't get around. An optimiser maximising P&L must have had fills — no fills means no P&L to maximise. So the fills were there, in the window I optimised over. They weren't in the seventy-one days that came after.
I optimised for how much money it would have made. I didn't check how often it would have to close a level in order to make it.
It would be easy to write this up as "the range was too wide, so it lost money." That isn't right, and I want to separate the two, because they have different causes.
Nothing filled — that's the division above. Five grids, 4–5% per level, and price never travelled that far in one direction inside the range.
It's down 41.34% — that's a different problem. That's the position itself moving against me while the grid sat there. A grid bot that never fills is still holding a position, and 8x is still 8x whether the bot is doing anything or not.
One number is a design mistake. The other is a leverage outcome. Mixing them up would let me tell a cleaner story than the one that actually happened.
The screenshot on this page is the grid detail for this run, taken on 2026-08-04. Everything on it that converts to money is covered — investment, total P&L, grid profit, unrealised P&L, position quantity, average entry, margin, available balance and the liquidation price. Price levels are covered too. What's left is the grid count, the direction, the leverage, the day count and the percentage. I'm listing what I covered so the gaps read as deliberate rather than as a crop that happened to be flattering.
Day 62, on 2026-07-26, this run was down 39.82% with zero profitable trades closed. Day 71, on 2026-08-04, it's down 41.34% with zero profitable trades closed. It hasn't moved in one direction the whole time — it was down 41.69% on day 69 and is slightly less down now. Nothing has closed on any of those days.
I haven't changed the settings since I started. I'm not agonising over it either. I'm waiting to see how it ends.
as of 2026-08-04
| day | P&L % | profitable trades closed | status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 71 | -41.34% | 0 | running |
Three things, and all three are about this run only.
An optimiser pointed at P&L gave me a range, and five grids across that range put each level 4–5% from the next. In seventy-one days price never crossed one and came back. That was the output of my process, not a property of grid bots.
The percentage in the table is where this run sits while it's still open. It isn't a final result and I'm not presenting it as one. Nothing about this run is finished, which also means nothing about it is finished enough for anyone to copy.
I don't know whether the fix is fewer grids, a narrower range, a different target to optimise for, or none of those. They aren't separable inside a single run and I only have one. I'll post the result either way, including if it ends the way it's currently going.
This is one asset, one exchange, one run that's still open. n = 1 run. It isn't evidence about grid bots in general, and it isn't a finished result.
I don't publish USDT amounts anywhere on this site. The percentage above is public, so a single amount would let anyone work out the size of the account. I don't publish price levels either — the range, the width of each step, the price axis — because those combine with the leverage to narrow down my entry and my liquidation price. You can check my ratios. You can't check my size, and that's deliberate.
I also haven't stated my fee tier or what I excluded, so you can't reproduce my cost side yet. Those two rows stay empty until I confirm them rather than being filled in with something plausible.
And I can't tell you what this run would have done with a different range or a different grid count, because I didn't run those. Anything I said about them would be a guess with a losing number attached to it, and that reads as evidence when it isn't.
Raw data isn't published yet. The CSV for this run, with a README repeating the method box above, goes here when it's up.
Every other record I've published →
educational only · no signals · no profit claims · not financial advice · dyor
bots ≤ 30% of my portfolio · core is index funds