Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
aesma
on 23/02/2021, 10:56:53 UTC
Well, as I said it's best to have fiat (shitcoin) for this one. Which is why I won't do it. But, basically you buy however many BTC on the spot for current price of 55000. At the exact same time you sell a future, perhaps Sep 26th for this example, for the same number of BTC at a current price of 62700. profit equals 7,700 minus fees per coin

This can be done using CBOE and CME as well as many others, perhaps less reputable exchanges.

The risk for this trade is couter-party only and of course opportunity cost (there is no possiblity of capital gains or losses). Not your keys not your coins. Thing is it's all about levels of risk and what you are comfortable with in the end as well as your goals. Just remember nothing is risk free. Even holding your own keys is not risk free, there are roughly 4million inaccessible coins to prove that.

*Above prices are taken from Deribit.
How does this work exactly? I would love a bit more ELI5.

I posted a link earlier, here it is again.
https://blog.bitmex.com/how-to-arbitrage-bitcoin-futures-vs-spot/

The WO sometimes must be combed thoroughly, but it usually does deliver good info - be it bitcoin or digital cameras.

Or you're just halftrolling and... username checks out?  Tongue

I don't believe CBOE offers BTC futures anymore. And i don't see Sept futures on CME. They're not trading now but i believe June futures were trading at around 7% premium. What you're forgetting is that CME is cash settled so they won't take your BTC as collateral for margin. Thus you'd actually need to lock up 150%, 100% to hedge with real BTC and then 50% to post for margin. At 150% that would bring actual premium down from 7% to 4,7%
As far as risks, you're forgetting that if BTC goes up before your settlement date you're gonna get margin called and will need to come up with more cash, or get automatically closed on a spike.

Also transfer times might be an issue, you'd need to sell your BTC and transfer funds to yourself and then to your broker at settlement.

Sure there are some premiums to be had if you want to tolerate the risk, just don't try to claim "140% returns with 0 risk"

I thought this seemed too easy. If the future was settled in BTC and collateral was in BTC that would be good, free money with not risk, but if everything is in fiat, that's another story entirely. And when you sell BTC to settle the future there are capital gains.