Spread Strategy: Earn the Gap Between Buy and Sell
How Pilotbot's spread strategy links a Buy and a Sell ad and keeps the price gap inside your corridor — within one exchange or across exchanges.
Pilotbot Team
Author
On this page
Many P2P traders earn from the gap: buy USDT a little below the market on one ad, sell it a little above on another. That gap is the spread — and the spread strategy exists to protect it. It links two of your ads into a pair and keeps the difference between them inside a corridor you define, around the clock.
What the Spread Strategy Is
A spread strategy is a link between two of your P2P ads:
- one Buy ad (you buy crypto from people), and
- one Sell ad (you sell crypto to people),
for the same pair (for example USDT/HKD). The AI agent continuously watches the price difference between the two ads and keeps it inside your spread corridor — a minimum you never want to fall below, and a maximum above which the market is behaving abnormally.
If the spread stays healthy, every buy-sell cycle keeps your margin. If it starts collapsing, the strategy reacts before the gap eats your profit.
Within One Exchange — or Across Exchanges
The pair doesn't have to live on one platform:
- Within one exchange — a Buy and a Sell ad on the same exchange (e.g. both on Binance). The classic setup: people sell you USDT via one ad, you sell it back via the other, and the corridor protects the margin between the two prices.
- Across exchanges — the Buy ad on one exchange and the Sell ad on another (e.g. buy on Bybit, sell on HTX). Useful when demand and supply are priced differently on different platforms: you earn the inter-exchange difference, and the strategy keeps that difference from disappearing.
Either way it's one strategy, one corridor, one pair card in your dashboard.
How It Works Under the Hood
The mechanism is deliberately one-sided and gentle:
- The Sell ad is the anchor. The strategy never touches it — it keeps trading by its own settings.
- The Buy ad is the regulated side. The agent adjusts only the Buy ad's markup:
- Spread below the minimum → the agent lowers the Buy markup, your buy price gets cheaper, the gap widens back. This is capital protection: you stop overpaying when the margin is too thin.
- Spread inside the corridor → the agent does nothing; the pricing engine works freely as usual.
- Spread above the maximum → the agent raises the Buy markup, narrowing an abnormally wide gap (which usually signals a market anomaly, not free money).
- All adjustments stay strictly inside the platform-wide ±19.9% safety corridor — the spread strategy can never push a price to an unsafe level.
- As with everything in Pilotbot, only you turn ads on or off — the strategy adjusts pricing, never the switches.
By default the corridor is 1% minimum to 60% maximum; you set your own bounds when creating the strategy.
How to Create a Spread Pair
- Open the AI agent and ask for a spread strategy (or pick the Spread Strategy preset when the agent offers presets).
- Choose the two ads — one Buy and one Sell of the same pair. Ads already used by another spread link won't be offered twice.
- Set the corridor — your minimum spread (the margin you refuse to fall below) and maximum.
- Filter settings — optionally enable Merchants only, so the spread is calculated only against verified exchange merchants and ignores noise from unverified ads.
- Press Create and launch — the pair is created and approved in one click.
If one of the two ads is currently offline on the exchange, the strategy shows as Pending and becomes Active as soon as both ads are live.
Watching Your Pair
The dashboard shows each spread link as a pair card with both ads and a spread bar — the current gap at a glance, against your corridor. If the spread ever collapses toward zero, Pilotbot raises a spread collapse warning in your notifications so you can react even if you're away.
What's a good minimum spread to set?
Your minimum is your worst acceptable margin, so set it just below your normal working spread: if you typically earn 2–3% per cycle, a 1–1.5% minimum protects you without triggering constantly. The default minimum is 1%.
Can the two ads be on different exchanges?
Yes — the pair can live on one exchange or across two different exchanges of yours (for example, Buy on Bybit and Sell on Binance). The strategy tracks the spread between them the same way.
Does the spread strategy turn my ads on and off?
No, never. It only adjusts the Buy ad's markup to defend the corridor. Listing or hiding ads — and enabling them in the bot — is always your action alone.