X user @Cbb0fe, known as CBB, published a long post on Sept. 2 Taipei time laying out how he and his brother spent the past 10 months running basis trades between Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 stock perpetual contracts and Interactive Brokers, or IBKR. By his account, the strategy produced $32 billion in trading volume and about $10 million in profit.
The post says the two originally came from crypto trading and had previously run what CBB described as the top arbitrage bot on HyperEVM. As firms including Wintermute and other new competitors moved in, margins became tighter. In October 2025, with the broader crypto market quiet, Hyperliquid launched HIP-3, and Unit / TradeXYZ later opened XYZ100, described in the article as the first stock perpetual market.
CBB wrote that Hyperliquid still had more than 40% of its token allocation left for the community at the time, and he believed generating HIP-3 volume could bring meaningful rewards. He and his brother decided to move fast and use the roughly 48-hour window before traditional institutions could clear compliance, approvals and internal processes. One problem stood out: neither of them had traded stocks before, and they knew nothing about traditional futures.
Building a two-sided hedging bot through IBKR
To connect the trade to traditional finance, they chose IBKR as the hedging venue. CBB said he repeatedly sent screenshots of the IBKR interface to Claude, asking how to hedge XYZ100 exposure, while his brother worked through IBKR’s API, market data subscriptions, contract specifications and order-type limits.
The result was a trading framework built around one reference point: treat IBKR quotes as the real price and monitor how far HIP-3 diverged from that level.
- If HIP-3 traded at a discount, the bot would buy on HIP-3 first and then short on IBKR after the fill.
- If HIP-3 traded at a premium, it would short on HIP-3 and buy on IBKR as the hedge.
The post included several risk settings. For names including NVDA, the minimum hedge size on the IBKR side was set at 55 contracts to avoid the broker’s $1 minimum commission. The system also used a maxDelta setting of 800, which halted trading in that market once the position gap between the two venues reached 800. On the HIP-3 side, the pair tuned maker quote size, taker entry thresholds and a preMarketOffset guard for poor pre-market liquidity.
Early gains gave way to a costly gold futures error
The bot went live in late October 2025. CBB said IBKR’s API disconnected often at first, but once the technical issues were managed, volume picked up quickly. In November, the pair generated about $850 million in HIP-3 volume and made more than $500,000 in profit. CBB called it “easy money.”
By January of the following year, what he described as a metals frenzy had taken hold, with traders rushing to go long gold and silver on Hyperliquid. He said the pair made more than $600,000 from funding fees alone, and monthly volume climbed to $1.7 billion.
Then came the largest setback in the write-up. On Jan. 27, just after arriving in Dubai to meet his brother for coffee, CBB said he received a liquidation warning from IBKR. When he checked the account, the two had built a net short position of as much as $120 million in gold futures at a time when gold was rallying sharply.
He attributed the problem to an IBKR API market data feed that failed to refresh correctly. The bot interpreted the stale data as a large delta mismatch between the two venues and kept adding gold shorts on IBKR in an attempt to correct the position. CBB said he shut the bot down and manually closed the $120 million short within 30 minutes. After the market opened and the positions were settled, the production bug had cost them $1.1 million.
Risk controls were tightened as the strategy expanded
After the seven-figure hit, the brothers did not stop. CBB wrote that they fixed the control logic overnight, forced freshness checks on IBKR quotes and upgraded risk management across the system. The next day, silver pulled back sharply from its record high, and the gap between Hyperliquid and IBKR briefly widened to about 3%. He said that trade brought in roughly $600,000 in a single day.
They later added dynamic capital management and obtained dedicated licenses from Databento and Nasdaq for faster market data. With the revised system, CBB said they were making a steady $60,000 to $120,000 on normal days during February’s oil crisis, which he described as the period when Trump’s bombing of Iran pushed oil above $100.
From May through July, the strategy also traded the semiconductor rally. The post named SNDK and MU as examples and said monthly volume reached $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion, with weekly profit averaging $400,000 to $500,000.
$32 billion in volume over 10 months, but CBB says the window is narrowing
As of the post published in September 2026, CBB said that he and his brother, who had known nothing about stocks 10 months earlier, had generated $32 billion in volume between HIP-3 and IBKR. He said that accounted for 1.5% of TradeXYZ’s total volume. Net profit was about $10 million, and annualized returns on deployed capital ranged from 35% to 45%.
CBB ended by saying the opportunity is becoming tighter. He pointed to Ethena’s recent announcement that it plans to enter the stock basis trading market, along with a growing number of regulated institutions building the connections needed to participate.