Why a Trading Bot Should Scan One Market at a Time

In Setup.Cash, a single bot scans one market type — all forex, all crypto, or all stocks. You cannot mix EURUSD with BTCUSD or AAPL in the same run. This is a deliberate design choice, and this article explains why it makes your bots safer and easier to reason about.

Different Markets, Different Mechanics

Forex, crypto, and stocks are not interchangeable:

• Sessions: Forex runs 24/5 with session-driven volatility; crypto is 24/7; stocks trade in exchange hours. A single risk model cannot fit all three.
• Data feeds: Each market uses different price sources and conventions.
• Brokers: A forex/CFD broker, a crypto exchange, and a stock broker are separate connections with separate execution rules.

Mixing them in one run would blur all of these and make behavior unpredictable.

Consistency Is Risk Control

A bot that scans one market can apply one coherent set of rules: the same session filter, the same volatility expectations, the same spread assumptions. When every instrument behaves similarly, your stop distances, position sizing, and guards all make sense together.

The moment you add a 24/7 crypto pair to a session-based forex bot, your news guard, spread guard, and timing logic stop meaning the same thing for every instrument.

How Setup.Cash Enforces It

The rule is enforced where it matters most — at run start. If a strategy's instruments span more than one market, the run is blocked with a clear message:

"A bot can only scan one market at a time. This strategy mixes Forex + Crypto. Keep all pairs in a single market."

The pair selector also prevents you from mixing markets while building, and text-to-strategy keeps every generated basket in a single market.

How to Trade Multiple Markets

You can absolutely trade forex, crypto, and stocks — just use separate bots:

• One forex bot scanning your FX basket.
• One crypto bot scanning your crypto basket.
• One stock bot scanning your equities.

Each runs with rules tuned to its market, and you manage them independently in the runs page. This is cleaner, safer, and easier to debug than one bot trying to do everything.

The Takeaway

Specialized bots beat generalist ones. By keeping each bot to one market, you keep your risk model honest and your behavior predictable. If you want exposure across markets, run a focused bot in each — and let each one do one job well.

Build your first single-market bot in the strategy builder.