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Grid Trading Calculator

A grid bot places a ladder of buy and sell orders across a price range and profits from every up-down swing inside it. Enter your range, how many grid levels, total capital and the exchange's trading fee — see the profit per grid level, total return for one full sweep of the range, and how much of that gets eaten by fees.

How a grid bot makes money

A grid trading bot splits a price range into evenly spaced levels and places a standing buy order at every level below the current price and a standing sell order at every level above it. When price ticks down into a level, the buy fills; when it later ticks back up through that same level, the sell fills, banking the difference. The bot repeats this automatically, level after level, for as long as price keeps moving inside the range — no forecasting of direction required, only that the range keeps getting revisited.

This calculator uses arithmetic spacing, the default mode on most exchange grid bots: each grid level sits a fixed dollar amount apart rather than a fixed percentage apart, so levels near the bottom of the range represent a slightly larger percentage move than levels near the top. Capital is split evenly across every grid cell, and the profit shown for each cell is what that cell nets if it completes one full buy-then-sell cycle.

Why "one sweep" is a baseline, not a forecast

The total shown here is deliberately the simplest possible case: what you'd net if price started at the bottom of the range and swept once to the top, filling every grid cell exactly one time. Real markets don't move in a straight line — a range-bound, choppy market can trigger the same grid cell many times over a day, multiplying the realized profit well past this baseline, which is exactly the market condition grid bots are built for. A trending market that blows through the range in one direction and never returns does the opposite: cells above (or below) the exit point never complete their second leg, so realized profit falls short of this number, and any capital left in an unfilled position is now just a directional, unhedged bet on an asset that left your range.

Fees and range choice matter more than they look

Every completed cell pays two fees — one on the buy, one on the sell — so a grid spaced tighter than your exchange's round-trip fee rate can lose money on every single fill even while gross profit looks positive. Widening the range or reducing the grid count increases the dollar spacing per cell (shown here as "grid spacing"), which increases profit per cell relative to the fixed fee cost. The trade-off is that fewer, wider grids fire less often, so there's a real balance between per-trade edge and how many times a given range gets revisited in practice.

Reading the result

"Total return" scales net profit against the full investment for one complete sweep — multiply it by however many sweeps you expect the range to see over your holding period for a rough total, keeping in mind that estimate is the real unknown in grid trading, not the math itself. If your average profit per grid is close to or below your round-trip fee cost, tighten the range or reduce the grid count before running the bot live.