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What happens during a market crash

How the bot behaves when the market drops sharply.

Expected bot behavior

In a sharp broad-market drop, here's what the bot does:

  1. Multiple pairs cross entry thresholds at once. Most of your enabled pairs are likely to enter their first DCA level within minutes of each other.
  2. USD balance drains fast. Each pair takes its entry-level USD allocation. If you have N pairs with $100 starting entries, the first wave drains ~$N × 100 from your USD balance.
  3. Insufficient-funds skips kick in. Once USD runs low, the bot logs buy_skipped_insufficient_funds for pairs whose next DCA can't be funded. The pair enters a cooldown so the bot doesn't hammer rejected orders on every tick.
  4. Deeper DCAs fill as the drop continues. Pairs that fit within your remaining USD continue DCAing.
  5. Sells stay in place. Your existing sell orders are above market — they're not hit by the crash, they just sit there waiting.

What CAN go wrong

Cascading max-capital hits
If several pairs hit their max-capital in the same crash, your free capital evaporates. Even high-conviction pairs that would keep DCAing get skipped.
Stop-loss fires across multiple pairs simultaneously
Realizes the worst-case loss on several pairs at the bottom of the drop. Painful but bounded.
Kraken outages
During extreme volatility, Kraken's API can rate-limit or return temporary errors. The bot has retry/backoff but can't execute orders that the exchange refuses.

What HASN'T happened (yet)

  • The bot doesn't custody funds — it can't lose access to your USD or your positions; only Kraken can.
  • The bot doesn't have leverage exposure — your maximum loss per pair is bounded by max-capital × (1 − stop_loss_pct).
  • The bot doesn't run on margin — no liquidation cascades.

What to do during a crash

  • Resist the urge to disable stop-losses mid-fall. Disabling at the bottom is the worst time.
  • Resist the urge to add capital to skipped pairs in the moment. If your sizing said "skip after max-capital" before the crash, that decision was correct precisely for this scenario.
  • Watch the bell + email notifications — security and billing events still fire normally.
  • Once volatility subsides, review your pair config + max-capitals. Did the blast radius match your expectations?

If a pair never recovers

Some pairs (illiquid altcoins, projects that fail) genuinely don't recover from a crash. Stop-loss is your tool here. If it's disabled and the pair is stuck, you can manually exit on Kraken; then disable / remove the pair from your bot config.