Choosing a strategy

1. Welcome to Surge if you are new to Surge.

Surge offers five strategy types. Each is a bet on a different kind of market behaviour, and each has a different relationship with fees. This page helps you pick; each strategy has its own full page.

At a glance

Strategy	You are betting on	Trades when	Wallets	Runs where	Pause persists across browsers?
Grid	Price chopping inside a band	The price crosses one of your rungs	1 strategy wallet	Surge servers, signed in your tab	No
DCA	Time in the market	A fixed interval elapses	1 strategy wallet	Your browser tab	No
Sequential arbitrage	Price gaps between DEX's	The gap covers all fees plus your minimum profit	1 strategy wallet	Surge servers, signed in your tab	No
Parallel arbitrage	Price gaps between DEX's	The gap covers all fees plus your minimum profit	2 strategy wallets	Surge servers, signed in your tab	No
Rule-based	Your own price levels	The market reaches a level	1 strategy wallet	Surge servers, signed in your tab	No
Cadence (Volume)	Nothing. It executes a schedule.	Its timetable says so	1–5 strategy wallets	Surge servers, signed in your tab	Yes

All five trade only while your tab is open. See How non-custodial works.

Choose by goal

• You expect a token to move sideways for a while: Grid. It needs enough spacing between rungs to beat about 6–7 ADA of round-trip fees — the builder tells you the minimum investment for the range you chose.

• You want to accumulate (or exit) a token gradually without watching the chart: DCA. Keep each order large enough that the flat fees (around 2–3 ADA per order) are a small fraction of it.

• You have wallets on two or more DEX's and want to harvest the difference between them: Arbitrage. Choose Sequential arbitrage for one wallet or Parallel arbitrage for two.

• You have specific prices in mind — "buy 200 ADA worth if it dips to X, sell half if it hits Y": Rule-based. Each level fires at its price or better, never worse.

• You need to put a planned amount of buy and sell volume through a pool over a set period: Cadence. This strategy costs its fees in full by design and does not express a market view.

What every strategy has in common

• A strategy wallet that funds and signs it (see Wallets in Surge).

• A Required balance panel in the builder that adds up trade budget, deposits and fees.

• A preview or backtest before you commit.

• Statuses Running / Paused / Stopped / Completed, plus Archived as a terminal read-only state. See Managing strategies.

• The same fee stack per order: Surge fee, batcher fee, network fee, refundable deposit, pool fee inside the price. See Fee breakdown.

• Profit and loss measured from actual fills only. Grid, Arbitrage and Rule-based report realized P&L per completed round trip and feed the dashboard and portfolio totals; Cadence shows a realized cash-flow figure on its own page only; DCA shows volume and fees but no P&L. See Profit and loss.

Drafts and clones

A builder remembers what you typed if you navigate away inside Surge (for example to the Wallets page to generate a wallet) and come back. Refreshing the page clears the draft. Grid, DCA, Arbitrage and Cadence strategies — live or archived — can be cloned into a pre-filled builder. [VERIFY: rule-based plans do not have a clone option in the current build.]