Main difference for me really is that I can trade with around 5x my balance while still only risking 1% while scalping, see for example if btc is at $10000 and my trade suggests a stoploss at $10020 and a take profit at $9900, i have a 5:1 RRR here, but normally on spot exchanges id only be able to just sell my own btc and profit off of the difference, so id make a 5% profit on that, but on a perpetual swap i can borrow 5x my balance to sell, if my stoploss hits i still only lose 1%, but if my take profit hits i make 5% rather than just 1%
Ah, the joys of leverage. So it seems that my inference was wrong.
Now, what really makes me curious is this: Suppose that the price of X is a random walk. I am not saying so about BTC, or any other existing asset: I am contemplating a hypothetical asset X.
A random walk without drift is pretty much the canonical example of a (non-)trend that cant be exploited: It presents a straight gamble. But it seems to me that if you can wager both ways at once as you describebetting one way with your money, and betting the other way on leverage with other peoples moneythen that would be ideal for exploiting a random walk.
Waving my hands a bit here (what type of random walk, etc.), say you somehow arrange it so that you have exactly 50% odds of hitting your stoploss before your profit take, 50%
vice versa: You thus have a 50% chance of losing 1%, and a 50% chance of gaining 5%. It is EV+ gambling on 50/50 odds.
It seems that I must have made a mistake here (and if I didnt, I had better get a margin account
which would mean defi, because I dont do KYC, and I dont know of any centralized exchanges that offer no-KYC margin accounts
sorry, Jay). What gives?