This is part 3 of the Hummingbot quickstart guide:

1. Install Hummingbot
2. Configure a market making bot
3. Run your bot

If you have successfully configured a bot in step 2, you should see the following message in the left pane of Hummingbot: 

Enable paper trading mode (optional)

You can set the bot to run in paper trading mode, In paper trading mode, the bot uses live order book data and real trades to simulate placing orders getting them filled. Note that if you don't enable paper trading mode, the bot will place real orders using your exchange balances.

Enter the command paper_trade to enable this feature.

Afterwards, the top bar in the Hummingbot client should say paper_trade: ON.

How do I edit paper trading mode balances? To change the asset balances used in paper trading, use the balance paper command. For example, to set a 1000 BTC paper trading balance, run balance paper 1000 BTC.

Start bot

Now that you have successfully configured a trading bot, you can start market making by running the start command.

Run bot

After some preliminary checks, the bot will fetch the current state of the order book and start placing orders.

You should see messages like this in the right-hand log pane.

Get bot status

Enter the command status (you can also use the Ctrl-S keyboard shortcut).

This command shows you:

• Preliminary checks: Checks to ensure that the bot is able to run
• Assets: How much of each asset you have
• Active orders: List of the current open orders
• Warnings: Warnings that may impact how your bot runs.

If you don't see any active orders, check that you have correctly entered API keys for the exchange.

See past trades and performance

Enter the command history.

This command shows you:

• List of trades: The trades your bot has performed during this session
• Inventory: How your inventory has changed as a result of these trades
• Performance: How much profit or loss your bot has made as a result of these trades

For more information on how Hummingbot calculates performance, refer to Performance Analysis.

Exit Hummingbot

Enter stop to stop the bot, or exit to stop and also exit Hummingbot.

Both stop and exit automatically cancels all outstanding orders and notifies you if it believes that there are potentially uncancelled orders.

When you restart Hummingbot, you can import your saved configuration file, which was automatically named conf_pure_mm_1.yml:

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🎉🎉🎉 Congratulations on successfully completing the Hummingbot quickstart guide!

Check out more quides in Hummingbot Academy.