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Hummingbot Blog

What is Inventory Risk?

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Hello again Hummingbot community!

Today we will start to talk about what I consider the most important factor that is part of all types of trading operations: risk and risk management.

As one of the biggest investors of our time once said:

"Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing." ~ Warren Buffett

Source: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/40644

All kinds of financial operations have varying degrees of risk, and market making is no different.

While it seems more exciting to imagine and project future gains and fantasize about being the next Warren Buffet, the reality and less glamorous part of investing, and arguably the most important part, is trying to figure out what can go wrong and how to mitigate losses that can result.

There is a lot to cover about risk and risk management, but today we will focus on one major risk related to market making: inventory risk.

Here is what we’ll cover in today's article:

  • What is inventory value?

  • What is inventory risk?

  • How to mitigate inventory risk with Hummingbot

What is Cross Exchange Market Making?

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Welcome back to our Educational Center, where we aim to help you to learn more about market making, arbitrage, and everything related to algorithmic trading.

Today we will talk about one of the core strategies that can be used with hummingbot: cross-exchange market making.

The objective of this article is to help you understand:

  • What is the cross-exchange market making strategy?
  • What is the difference between cross-exchange market making and arbitrage?
  • How is cross-exchange market making different from pure market making?
  • Why and when should I use this strategy?

What is Market Making?

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Welcome to Hummingbot Academy!

If you reached this page, there is a high probability that you have been asking one of these questions:

  • What is a market maker?
  • What do market makers do?
  • How can I become a market maker?
  • How do I create a market making robot?

Then you are on the right place!

Here at Hummingbot, our goal is to help you learn more about market making and how to use our free open-source robot to implement your own strategy.

Scaling the Hummingbot developer community

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From the beginning, we conceived of Hummingbot as a shared public utility: an open source project that helps you create trading bots on any crypto exchange without having to write low-level integrations to exchange APIs.

We knew that we would have to create the first few exchange integrations, but we hoped that over time, the open source nature of the Hummingbot codebase would allow others to contribute their own exchange connectors and strategies.

Since we launched last year, 58 unique developers have contributed to the open source Hummingbot codebase. But we’re also aware we should be doing more to support the many developers, both professional and individuals, who want to customize Hummingbot for their own needs and contribute to the open source codebase.

Liquidity Mining in Hummingbot vs DeFi

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The need for liquidity is as constant a theme in the cryptocurrency market as are death and taxes. However, as we have previously written in other blogs (such as this one, the way in which token issuers and exchanges procure market making in the crypto market is broken. The reliance on high cost, price gouging crypto market makers is just not sustainable or scalable. This led us to propose the concept of liquidity mining and launch the Hummingbot Miners platform for decentralized and crowd-sourced market making.

We have been encouraged to see other projects experiment with community-based liquidity provision, most notably in DeFi with automated market makers (AMM). Whether it’s called “liquidity mining” or “yield farming”, there has been a surge in activity in DeFi as protocols such as Compound, Synthetix, Balancer, Ampleforth, and Loopring aim to propel wider market adoption by rewarding their communities for providing liquidity.

With this heightened interest in liquidity mining, we explain in this blog how our Hummingbot Miner platform fits into the landscape. We also compare and contrast liquidity mining in the order book model popularized by centralized exchanges versus the automatic market maker (AMM) model that is prevalent in DeFi.

Interview with Community Member Vik

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2023 Update: Discover Vik's journey in Botcamp!


Over four months have passed since we initiated Liquidity Mining. With an increasing number of token projects and miners, our platform has seen significant growth. In this post, we feature Vik, one of our top liquidity miners, and her insightful experiences.

Vik embarked on her Bitcoin journey in December 2017, purchasing at the market peak. Despite significant losses in the following year, she persevered, refining her trading strategies and eventually discovering the benefits of liquidity mining. Currently, she achieves a monthly return of approximately 5-7% through this approach.

Interview with Market Maker Harry Yeh

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We recently had the opportunity to interview Harry Yeh, Managing Partner at Binary Fintech Group, who brings over seven years of experience in the cryptocurrency trading industry.

Binary Fintech Group, initially established as an Over-the-Counter (OTC) trading desk, caters to a select group of crypto traders. Recently, leveraging the capabilities of Hummingbot, they have embarked on implementing high-frequency market making strategies.

In this post, we share key excerpts from our video interview, wherein Harry imparts valuable insights into the nuances of crypto algorithmic trading and market making.

Introducing the Celo Arbitrage Bot

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TL;DR

In the next release of Hummingbot (ETA 2 weeks), we will be officially supporting the Celo blockchain protocol and releasing a new algorithmic trading strategy called celo-arb.

This strategy will allow anyone with cGLD or cUSD, the two native tokens of the Celo ecosystem, to earn arbitrage profits while contributing to the stability of the Celo protocol.

In addition, this strategy bridges the disparate worlds of centralized order book exchanges and decentralized automated market makers (AMMs), improving efficiency and price discovery for both.

Interview with Liquidity Miner Neohowie

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Nearly three months have passed since the launch of Miner. We are thrilled to witness the enthusiastic participation and fierce competition among many miners in our liquidity mining program.

In this post, we introduce Neohowie, a consistent ranker in our Weekly Top 10. Beginning his crypto journey in 2015, he has gained significant insights into market making through our liquidity mining program. Let's explore his journey!