September 04, 2025
These bots can put a heavy strain on the site, making it slower for real traders like you. The chart below shows just how much bot traffic I have to deal with — all those yellow bars are blocked bots, not real users:
🚦 What the Traffic Chart Shows
That screenshot covers just 12 hours of traffic — and most of it isn’t from people. It’s from automated bots.
- The yellow(ish) bars are requests that got blocked by my defenses.
- There were thousands of bogus requests in this short window.
- Real traders’ visits (the green sections) are a much smaller slice of the graph compared to the sea of junk traffic.
- In the time slice that’s highlighted, there is more than 10 times the amount of human traffic coming from bots! That type of surge happens every single day right around the time that SwingTradeBot publishes its nightly scan results!
🤖 Why Bots Target SwingTradeBot (and Other Finance Sites)
As far as I can tell there are a few motivations for these bots:
- Data Harvesting: Many scrapers are trying to copy lists of stocks, scan results, or technical signals for their creators’ own trading and/or to resell or republish elsewhere.
- Competitive Intelligence: Other finance sites sometimes use bots to quietly gather information on scans, signals, or analysis features to imitate them.
- AI Training: Some crawlers feed financial data into machine learning or AI models without asking permission.
- SEO Spam: Bots collect trading-related keywords and content to generate low-quality “SEO” sites.
- Content Theft: Some scrape pages directly to repost them on forums or blogs, often without credit.
- Exploits / Recon / Mayhem: A small subset of bots aren’t scraping content but probing for vulnerabilities, trying to find ways to exploit the site.
- Spreadsheets: Years ago I had to block Google Sheets’s traffic because it was slamming my site with traffic. Apparently there were some people who created spreadsheets which pulled data from SwingTradeBot. Despite the fact that those sheets no longer work because I’ve blocked Google Sheets’ access those sheets still attempt to pull data from SwingTradeBot hundred (if not thousands) of times every singe day!
Why I Had to Add Protections
I’ve been doing pretty basic bot blocking for several years. But this year I noticed a lot more bot traffic & it was starting to bog down my web servers. If I let that traffic through unchecked:
- Real users would notice slower scans, laggy page loads, or even downtime.
- SwingTradeBot could become less reliable overall.
Bot operators are becoming more sophisticated. They are deploying techniques to evade detection such as human-like mouse movements and click patterns. Some use a “low and slow” approach to carry out attacks using fewer requests, which is difficult to detect. Meanwhile, advances in GenAI and LLMs have made it easier for non-technical users to write scripts, leading to a significant rise in the number of simple bots. At the other extreme, GenAI is also helping cybercriminals to create more sophisticated bots at an accelerated rate.
The 2025 Bad Bot report also noted an increase in the use of residential proxies by bot operators. This practice makes it appear that the bot is a person, and that the traffic originates from a legitimate, ISP-assigned residential IP address. Bot traffic from residential ISPs now accounts for 21 percent of bad bot traffic.
The residential proxies came onto my radar this year. The vast majority of the bots hitting SwingTradeBot are “hiding behind” T-Mobile & Comcast IP addresses. It’s that residential proxy traffic that forced me to take more aggressive measures to combat the bots because they were impervious to my previous, mostly IP address based bot blocking measures.
So that’s why I’ve had to tighten protections on SwingTradeBot — to ensure that real traders get a fast, reliable experience.
What This Means for You
Most of you won’t notice anything different. But if you browse without signing in, or open lots of SwingTradeBot pages (in separate browser tabs) at once, you might see these error messages:
- Temporary Traffic Surge – This means you’ve been throttled (rate limited) — this is a warning to slow down.
- Access Denied – if you trigger multiple traffic surge warnings, the system will block your traffic for a short time (usually about 10 minutes).
✅ How to Avoid Being Blocked
Here are some easy tips to make sure you never run into problems:
- Sign in / Log in (even with a free account). Logged-in users don’t get throttled / blocked.
- Keep cookies enabled in your browser. SwingTradeBot uses them to recognize you as a real person.
- Don’t open too many pages at once. If you have a bookmark folder that opens multiple SwingTradeBot tabs in one click, try spacing them out a little.
- If you see a “Temporary Traffic Surge” message, pause for a moment before clicking more links or refreshing. Even better, use the sign-in link to log into your account.
- VPN users: some VPN services share IP ranges with data centers that bots use. If you get blocked while on a VPN, try switching to a different VPN server.
The Goal: A Faster, More Reliable SwingTradeBot
By blocking this junk traffic, SwingTradeBot stays:
- Fast — so pages load quickly
- Reliable — less chance of slowdown or downtime
🙏 Thanks for Understanding
I know these changes might affect some browsing habits, especially if you like opening lots of bookmarks / tabs at once or if you use a VPN. But keeping the site speedy and reliable for traders (you!) is worth it.
If you ever get blocked while using the site normally (especially if you’re logged in to your account), just let me know — I can review and fine-tune the rules.
