Your Position Sizing

Position sizing answers two questions: how much to put in, and how far price can move before the bot needs a refill. GridBT requires an existing long position and an existing short position on each pair to operate. The amounts you seed determine your grid distance, effective leverage, and how long the bot can run before your long or short runs out of inventory.

GridBT ships with three profiles. Each one sets the order size, grid spacing, and exposure limits for you. The seed amounts below are what the Dashboard recommends when you use the Seed Feature.

All profiles seed equal long and short so you start balanced. Multiple-pair profiles scale total capital with the pair count.

Grid distance is how far price can move before your long or your short runs out of inventory to trade. The Dashboard's Seed Feature calculates this for you as you enter amounts.

Using Conservative as an example (long $500, short $500, order sizes $10 long / $5.50 short, spacing 0.37%):

Short has a wider grid distance with the same seed because short orders are smaller ($5.50 vs $10), so each dollar buys more slots. Short downside distance is geometric and cannot exceed 100%.

Grid distance at recommended seed amounts:

Your long (or short) runs out when all of its close orders have filled and the position reaches zero. At that point it enters open-only mode: it keeps placing open orders to rebuild inventory, but cannot place any close orders because there is nothing to close yet. Your other position is unaffected and continues normal two-way operation.

Example: You seed $500 long and $500 short on HYPEUSDT. Price rallies 20%. Your long's sell orders fill one by one as price rises, collecting grid profit along the way, until your long position hits zero. Your long is now open-only: it keeps placing buy orders below market to rebuild, but has nothing left to sell. Your short keeps running normally throughout.

Your strategy now has a directional bias. You are rebuilding your long without the matching sell orders cycling, so you are effectively net short in exposure terms. This is not catastrophic. It means the market has moved beyond your seeded grid distance. Once your long's buy orders fill and rebuild a position, sell orders resume automatically and your long returns to normal two-way cycling.

If you want to restore full two-way cycling faster, you can add more inventory at any time and any amount using the Seed Feature on the Dashboard, or add to a position manually anytime through the Bybit Exchange Trading UI.

Effective leverage is your total position value divided by your wallet balance. The maxNetExposureUsd setting caps how far the bot can let your long and short drift apart, which puts a hard ceiling on leverage.

You can change this value at any time in the Config editor.

Each profile sets maxNetExposureUsd: $1,000 per pair. In the worst case, your long or short reaches the full limit while the other is at zero. The table below shows the worst-case math for each profile:

Day one you start balanced ($500 long / $500 short per pair, net = $0). The bot can only reach the ceiling if your long or short drifts heavily ahead of the other, and the maxNetExposureUsd limit stops it there.

If your short ever grows significantly larger than your long, Hedge Guard activates automatically to increase the size of long buy orders, helping your long catch up and restore balance.

Two settings control how large your long and short can grow per pair. Both can be adjusted in the Config editor.

maxNetExposureUsd limits the difference between your long and short. This is your primary risk control.

Because your long and short partially offset each other on Bybit's cross-margin account, the real risk is not the total size of your positions but how unbalanced they are. A $1,500 long and a $1,400 short is much safer than a $1,500 long and a $0 short, because the short is absorbing most of the risk.

When the difference between your long and your short exceeds maxNetExposureUsd, the bot stops adding to whichever is larger. The smaller one keeps running normally, which naturally closes the gap.

Example with maxNetExposureUsd: 1000:

maxGrossPositionUsd limits long + short combined as a hard cap on total position size. This is a secondary risk control and in practice is rarely triggered.

Hitting this limit is not inherently dangerous. If your long and short are both large but roughly equal, your net exposure is still near zero. For example, a $5,000 long and a $5,000 short gives a combined total of $10,000 but a net exposure of $0. The gross limit simply prevents unlimited growth on both positions simultaneously.

When the combined total hits this ceiling, both your long and short stop opening new orders until positions shrink via close orders filling. If you want to reset this faster, you can manually reduce both positions by an equal amount through the Bybit trading UI (reduce-only), which brings the combined total down without creating a new imbalance.

Example with maxGrossPositionUsd: 5000:

Your seed amounts are day one. As price moves, the bot naturally shifts the balance between your long and short:

Drift is expected and healthy. The Rebalancer can detect and correct extreme imbalances over time.

Some symbols enforce a minimum order quantity that overrides your orderSizeUsd setting.

BTCUSDT at $70,000 for example, has a minimum quantity step of 0.001 BTC. At typical prices that is roughly $70 per order. If you set orderSizeUsd: 10, orders will be rounded up to the minimum, and your actual grid distance will differ from the estimate.

HYPEUSDT supports small notionals and works well for all three starter profiles. Verify effective order size on the Bybit Trading Exchange (or contact support) if you are uncertain.