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Brokers

Coinbase

Crypto spot trading by hand, on your live Coinbase account.

Trading on margin can lose you more than you put in. Past results, including backtests, do not predict future results. Cloud9Trader provides tools and education, not financial advice. Read the full risk warning.

Connect your Coinbase Advanced Trade account to see your balances and to send spot orders. The connection is new: it is built and tested against Coinbase’s published API but has not yet been run end to end on an account, so it is marked beta.

Coinbase has no practice account. Every order on a Coinbase key uses real money. Try the same trades on the demo account first, start with small amounts, and check each order in Coinbase’s own app.

What you can do

Section titled “What you can do”
  • Manual orders: market, limit and stop-limit orders on Coinbase spot products. A market order fills at once, and any part that cannot fill is cancelled; a limit or stop-limit order is GTC unless you choose otherwise.
  • Stop loss and take profit: both together on an entry, as Coinbase’s attached bracket.
  • Account view: your portfolio’s balance and each coin you hold, with its average entry price.

Algorithm sessions cannot trade on Coinbase yet.

Connect

Section titled “Connect”
  1. In the Coinbase Developer Platform, create a Secret API key for Advanced Trade with the ECDSA signature algorithm. Give it permission to view and to trade. Do not give it permission to transfer: Cloud9Trader refuses a key that can transfer funds, or cannot trade, and checks again every hour.
  2. Coinbase shows the key’s name and its private key, a block of text that starts with -----BEGIN. Copy both, because Coinbase shows the private key once.
  3. In Cloud9Trader, open Exchange API Keys from the user menu. In Coinbase’s row, paste the name into API key name and the whole private key, including its first and last lines, into Private key. The only choice is Live (real money). Click Save.

The key trades in the portfolio it was created for. If it can see several portfolios, Cloud9Trader uses your default one.

Limits

Section titled “Limits”
  • Spot only.
  • No plain stop orders and no DAY orders. Coinbase cannot carry a stop loss or take profit on its own, or a trailing stop. An order that asks for one is refused, not sent without it.
  • Quantities and prices must be in the product’s steps and inside its limits. Anything else is refused, never rounded.
  • One Coinbase connection per Cloud9Trader account.
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