Managing Exchange Balances, Paper Funds, and Bot Limits in Hummingbot
Summary
This guide explains how to inspect balances across connected exchanges and wallets, including assets allocated to active orders, and how to view and adjust a paper-trading account. Paper balances can be increased for a specified asset, enabling simulated trading with a customized starting inventory.
It also describes per-asset balance limits for live exchange or wallet use. These limits can constrain how much of a shared token multiple bots may use; the guide illustrates the behavior with a market-making setup where order sizes or levels are restricted by a USDT cap. A limit of zero prevents initial orders for that asset until trades accumulate it, while a setting of negative one disables the feature. The guide is operational documentation, not a trading strategy or performance study, and its example command output contains an exchange-name inconsistency.
Key ideas
- The balance command displays connected wallet and exchange funds, including amounts committed to active orders.
- Paper-trading balances can be inspected and adjusted by asset.
- Per-asset balance limits constrain funds available to bots sharing an account.
- A zero limit can prevent initial orders until trading accumulates the asset, while negative one disables the limit.
- The market-making example shows a balance cap changing order amounts and preventing additional order levels.
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Full text
# How to get Balances
# How to get Balances
## Exchange and wallet balance
Run the `balance` command to check the balances of all connected wallets and exchanges.
The **"Allocated"** column shows how much of your assets are being used when there are active orders.
## Paper Trade balance
Run the `balance paper` command to check your paper trade account balance.
By default, these are the paper trade balances pre-loaded in Hummingbot. You can also enter additional assets and credits to use in paper trade mode.
## Adding Paper Trade Balance
By default, the paper trade account has the following tokens and balances which you can see when you run the `balance paper` command.
```
>>> balance paper
Paper account balances:
Asset Balance
DAI 1000.0000
ETH 10.0000
ONE 1000.0000
TUSD 1000.0000
USDC 1000.0000
USDQ 1000.0000
USDT 1000.0000
WETH 10.0000
ZRX 1000.0000
```
When adding balances, specify the asset and balance you want by running this command `balance paper [asset] [amount]`.
For example, we want to add 0.5 BTC and check our paper account balance to confirm.
```
>>> balance paper BTC 0.5
Paper balance for BTC token set to 0.5
>>> balance paper
Paper account balances:
Asset Balance
BTC 0.5000
DAI 1000.0000
ETH 10.0000
ONE 1000.0000
TUSD 1000.0000
USDC 1000.0000
USDQ 1000.0000
USDT 1000.0000
WETH 10.0000
ZRX 1000.0000
```
## Balance limits
Sets the amount limit on how much assets Hummingbot can use in an exchange or wallet. This can be useful when running multiple bots on different trading pairs with same tokens e.g. running a BTC-USDT pair and another bot on ETH-USDT using the same account.
### How it works
You can set how much of a particular token the bot can use by running the command `balance limit [exchange] [asset] [amount]`. You can disable this feature by editing it in the global config file and set it to -1. While setting it to 0 will initially not place any order for a specific asset until a trade is executed to accumulate the said asset.
For example:
```
>>> balance limit binance USDT 20
Limit for USDT on bybit exchange set to 20.0
```
Run the `balance limit` command to confirm if the changes are applied
### Example Scenario
Create a pure market making strategy, run the `config` command to view the whole configuration. The command `balance limit bybit USDT 20` is used as example
On this scenario we set a config with `order_levels 2` this way we can also see how the balance limit works. The strategy would only be able to create orders that will not be more than 20 USDT. On the screenshot below, the client was trying to buy a XRP on a amount of 10.137 USDT and observed that the second buy order amount adjusted due to balance limit.
On the screenshot below, a buy order has been successfully filled and after order refresh time the client created orders again but observed that now it did not created another order level since it is beyond the set balance limit of 20 USDT.
## Displaying token symbols in `balance`
You can use Gateway `gateway token` commands to view or update token metadata used with DEX connectors. See [Working with Tokens](../gateway/configuration.md) for more information.Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: Apache-2.0
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.