Bitcoin Forum

We just launched Coinut (https://coinut.com), the only place where you can trade bitcoin options. Predicting the market direction is usually difficult, while predicting the volatility is relatively easier because the volatility after high volatility is usually still high, but the trend of BTC/USD after a slump is usually...unclear. Through options, you can make profit from volatility trading with confidence. This is just one advantage of trading options, and the following gives you a complete list

• By trading volatility, you can make profit no matter which direction the price is going in
• You can also make profit by predicting the market direction
• Your maximum possible loss/profit is determined at the very beginning so you don't need to worry after you buy an option
• High leverage without default risk

What are options?
Options are a simple way to trade price fluctuations. By trading options, you can profit in both bearish and bullish markets. For example, if you believe the price of BTCUSD will go above 500 by next Friday, you can buy a BTCUSD call option (or sell a put option) which has the strike price equal to 500 and expires on next Friday. If you hold the option and if the price is indeed above 500 at the end of next Friday, you win, otherwise you lose. Instead of holding it, you can also sell the option to others before it expires.

The options in our platform are bitcoin settled. No matter you are are a seller or a buyer, all you need is bitcoin.


How to trade when I cannot predict BTC's direction?
You can bet on bitcoin's price direction if you are sure about it. But in most cases, we don't know the direction. Instead of betting on the direction, via options, you can trade its volatility, which is generally easier to predict. For example, if BTC/USD is now 400, and you know the volatility will be high, you can simultaneously buy a CALL option with strike price equal to 420 and a PUT option 380. Then you will be able to make profit no matter which direction BTC/USD goes in, because if it goes above 420, the CALL option will win, and if the price goes below 380, the PUT option will win. For more detailed information about trading options, please check https://coinut.com/how-to-trade.


How do you ensure the safety of my money
This is a critical question, and thus the answer will be a bit long.
First, we think hot wallets cannot be secure as many sites like Mt.Gox were hacked in the past no matter how hard they tried to secure their sites. So, we do not use hot wallets. Instead, we store all your Bitcoins in an offline computer (cold-storage) that cannot be accessed through the Internet, and the online wallet is only for monitoring purpose and cannot be used for withdrawals. The offline computer's hard disk and the wallet are all encrypted so even if some people get physical access to the offline computer, they still cannot access the wallet. Also, withdrawal requests are manually checked before they are processed.

Second, we believe transparency is very important. Therefore we adopted the proof of reserve audit approach described in this article. It generates verifiable audit results and has been adopted by a few big name exchanges such as Bitstamp and Bitfinex. We move this idea one step further. Instead of relying on a third party to verify that we have more Bitcoins than users' total balance, we directly show how much Bitcoin reserves we have and how much the total user balance is, and we do this weekly instead of quarterly or yearly. This removes the necessity of the third party, which users may not trust, and also provide much better transparency to the users.

Third, when we copy the double checked unsigned transactions from the online computer to the offline computer to sign, we do not use USB drives, as the online computer may be infected with virus (although this is unlikely as both the offline and online computers are based on Linux. The offline computer is dedicated for signing transactions after the Linux system was installed, so there shouldn't be any virus). We convert the unsigned transactions to a QR code and show it on the online computer's screen, and then we use the camera of the offline computer to scan it. After signing the transactions, we display the QR code on the offline computer and use the online computer's camera to scan the signed transactions and propagate them into the Bitcoin network.

Forth, our system is deployed on the always update-to-date Linux operating system, and we follow the best practices of Linux server management. Our system is deliberately programmed in a secure fashion. Our databases are backed up every day, and all important information is logged and backed up as well.

How do we calculate the price index
Please check https://coinut.com/index.

For more information, please visit https://coinut.com. You can also contact us by dropping us an email. Our email address is support@coinut.com

Chears,
The Coinut Team
Coinut.com

OK, guys, after spending my past two years on my PhD thesis, the situation now has become very different from two years ago when I launched http://workforbitcoin.com.
Right now, it is much more difficult to gain people's trust.

But please also notice that I didn't run away with the money in http://workforbitcoin.com. That should increase your confidence on me, right?

You are right, I also won't let any of you to risk money with me. I am a researcher, for whom integrity and honesty are the most basic and crucial characteristics. But could you please don't judge a person by his/her name like you shouldn't judge a person by his/her skin color?

Finally, some people is providing liquidity now.

I tried signing up to check it out but I don't get past the registering page :/

Edit: after a long time it actually said it sent an email. The dialog box was distorted though.

I suggest

- reducing the number of strikes.

- increasing the time to maturity

- introduce more than binary options


For me this doesn't seem very useful, but I'm not a day trader. The focus is very short term.

Open up the market information without the need to register.

Since we are the first to introduce exchange traded bitcoin options, we are still determining the expiration dates. Do you have any suggestions?
I am still working on vanilla options, but they could require a big amount of margin for sellers as the volatility can be extremely high. How much margin is required is still a question.

Agree.. Why should someone register? Leaving my email is a big X sign for me.

As many of you requested, I have added the market data onto the home page. So you can now see the data without registration.

There is still quite limited liquidity. I need your help to add more.

Thanks! Looks much better. Just to clarify though, the underlying is 1 BTC? Any successful trades so far?
Also, how do you insure against counterparty risk? You need an FAQ page that explains the whole thing before people are comfortable putting real money into it.

Regarding the counter-party risk, we currently support binary options only. For binary options, it is impossible for the sellers to default, because the maximum possible loss of sellers is fixed at the very beginning, and the system can automatically check the users' balance and reserve enough margin that can cover the maximum possible loss before the user actually buys an option. We are still working on vanilla options. As vanilla options are much more risky, it is going to take a little more time for us do work out a good solution.

As many of you suggested that it is difficult to trade when the maturity periods are too short, I have changed the periods from within 1 week to a few weeks. This can probably make you trade more deliberately.

To make you trade more conveniently, I am planning to add a binary options pricing calculator to the interface.

Nice logo

Yeah, the homepage and the core trading interface are all improved.

Just registered on your website, there is some liquidity now. It looks quite cool.

Guys, we have got some liquidity, but please come and provide more. Thanks!

We just got a constant liquidity provider. So you can keep trading now.  :)

We are running a signature contest here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=865682.0. Please post yours if you are a designer.

I like the fact that you're expanding investment options.

I just tried to buy a call option and received a "failed transaction" message.

I think it would help if you had account balance information so we can see how much BTC we've transferred over, how much we have to make trades, and how much has cleared through expired contracts/options. I don't want to transfer money every single time I make a trades...nor do I want to wait days for that transaction to go through.

I love that you have binary options and are trying to sort out how to provide vanilla options as well.

Keep at and don't default on payments and the community WILL start to support you.

Thank you for the questions. I saw you deposited. You can see your balance after you login. It's at the top left side of the Trade page. You can also check your deposit history from the History page. Expired options can be found in the History page as well. Defaults are impossible because sellers are required to reserve enough margin to cover maximum possible loss in order to open a position.

Just added the chatting function. I'll be answering your questions there if you have any.

This is interesting... But you said that everyone gains money which I do not understand. In order for one to gain money there has to be someone that loses some.

I did not say that everybody gains money. But you can make money consistently if you know enough.

okay well... I wish anyone who dares endeavor into this exchange the best of luck. I know I'm not good with trading but I know there will be someone who will figure this out.

Man, Coinut is not a competitor with BIT-X.COM. I hope you understand that.

I know lol, but it is still an exchange where people can both win and lose.

I guess posts like this may not earn you BTC :-). Anyway, if you want to discuss more, please PM me. Thanks

We have launched out latest promotion. Top the leader board at the end of this week, ie. on 7th December, 00:00 GMT and take home a prize of 0.05BTC.

More details can be found here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=880838.msg9716620#msg9716620

Today I signed up for the signature campaign and was required to trade an option.
I think I did, but I also think it costed less than 0,01BTC while the website says 0,01 is minimum, is this right?

Yeah, you are right, if you buy options, you need less than 0.01 BTC. But usually you need more than that to do meaningful trading.

Ok, thanks for the quick reply but I don't want to loose much BTC because I'm new to options.
Just trying out first.
Do I now meet the requirements for the signature campaign as well?
I saw there is still one open slot.

Sure, but only English posts of you will count. Is that OK to you?

No problem, I hardly post in the Dutch forum anyway.
If I'm restricted to english I will only post in the English forums.

You can still post in Dutch, but we will not count those.

No problem.

Where can I check if I'm enrolled? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=877329.0 still says 1 open slot for senior member.

I joined your campaign and try to learn trading options on your website.
I noticed two things:

• When logged in and you refresh the page, you'll get this message. It's annoying and confusing. It could be done different I think

http://i62.tinypic.com/zl277s.png

• When you press the Coinut logo topleft, the browser opens a new tab while I expect to stay on the same tab and go to the homescreen (whatever that should be)

I still don't really get it yet, but I think I just have to read a little bit longer.

We design the application in a way that you don't need to refresh your page. Everything is updated automatically. Isn't this better?

Another reason that we don't support refreshing is that we don't rely on cookies, because cookies could be stolen and thus insecure. That's why you see many internet banking systems also do not support refresh. Also because we don't use cookie to track your session, you cannot go to the homepage and then back to the trading interface within one tab. That's why the home page is opened in a new tab.

Suggestion:

At the history segment it would be nice if bitcoin addresses are selectable so that I can copy paste it into my browser.
It would be even better if the address is hyperlinked to blockchain.info so that you can see directly what the status is.

What's the BTC exchange you get price?

Options give more profit if the price is volatile. I will start buying options when there is a movement in bitcoin price.

We use Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Karen, BTC-E, BTCChina CampBX. We calculate a average of these price ticks weighted by the bid and ask amount.

Yes, have you tried recently? It's quite volatile.

We were just attacked by a team called DD4BC using DDoS.

DD4BC Team <dd4bc@safe-mail.net>:
Hello,

Your site is extremely vulnerable to DDoS attacks.

I want to offer you info how to properly setup your protection, so that you can't be ddosed.

If you want info on fixing it, pay me 1 BTC to 13adm65yzzre7fLKSFZayQ8dYyxgXaVyMU


Xinxi Wang:
Thanks. Yes, I know this. It's currently a little vulnerable to DDoS attacks. But we just cannot afford the money to fix it at this moment. I will definitely contact you when we are ready.

Then they just sent millions of requests. And it's difficult for me to open the site.



Xinxi Wang:
Man, you just selected the wrong target. Maybe you should try this after a few months.

DD4BC Team:
OK, contact me within a few months and I will stop the attack. :)

CloudFlare will not help.

And one more thing: Price is 1 BTC today. Tomorrow it will increase to 2 BTC and will keep increasing for every day of delay.


Xinxi Wang:
Man, I am a computer science PhD student, and I don't have so much money.


DD4BC Team:
Good for you. I'm not sure how is your formal education going to help in this situation, but...good luck.


Xinxi Wang:
I also think so.

BTW, The site is now working although they are still attacking.

Ignore him, he does this to many sites.

That was... strange. The BTC/USD dropped before my eyes from $230 down to $50~ before recovering back up. Wiped the limit orders off of the screen. Was that just a glitch?

Yeah, it can happen if BTC exchanges are short for liquidity and BTC price can jump very rapidly.

We just added vanilla options. Please contact us if you want to be a liquidity provider. There will be a good offer for you.

I'm in the market for some put options so I'm happy to find this site, means I don't have to talk to people.  ;D

Only, I'm not clear on how deep the market is right now. When I see (for example) Amount: 14, does that mean there are only 14 contracts at the given asking price, or only 14 contracts for that strike at all? Obviously I hope it's the former, since I'm not that interested in insuring 0.14 bitcoins.

Hi Ian, how much do you want to buy? We can definitely find a seller for you if it is not too large.

I’m new to bitcoin and i’m new to options trading. I understand the basic principle of call and put options. But I’m not understanding the interface you use.

   What is the “amount”? the number of options you are buying?
   
   What is the “price”? ...

   I understand the strike price is the point at which the bet takes place.

What is the

 “bid", and “ask”?



What?

An option contract has a seller and a buyer. In our site, contract size is 0.01BTC. Amount is the number of contracts. Bid shown on the trading interface is the best buyers' price, and ask the best sellers' price. Price of the order form is the price that you want to buy or sell the contracts at.

So If I want 1BTC i'd put in 100 as my amount and set the Price at .01 BTC?

And if I set my strike price to 230 USD and it goes to 232, I'd get to buy 1 BTC at what price exactly?

If you want 1BTC, you need to put 100 as your amount. This is correct.

The price should be based on your estimation. I give you some intuitions using an example.

Suppose you want to buy 100 CALL option with strike price 230. If the final price is above 230, you get 1 BTC back and thus you make profit=1 - Price*100. Otherwise, you get nothing back and thus lose Price*100. To make profit, you want to make sure your expected reward is positive. If the chance that the final price is above 230 is P, then your expected reward is P*(1-Price*100) + (1-P)*(-Price*100). To make it positive, Price should be less than 0.01*P. So your estimation of P is the key.

Don't call and put stock options work differently?

I thought the only loss on the buyer was the price of buying the stock option.
Then if you don't win the bet you only loose the price of the stock option.

Your site seems to work a bit like BTCoracle.com.

Where you have to put down a certain amount first, in order to get any profit, and then that profit is limited by a certain price multiplier on how much you put down. Which makes both sides of the trade obligatory not optional.

As far as I know the stock option allows one to buy and sell at a certain price, and if it doesn't reach that price you only loose the price of the option.

How is your system different?

Call and put options are different. I used call options in my example. You are right. Buyers lose only the price of the options. We are different from BTCoracle.com because you can choose different strike price and set option price in our site.

You are right that stock options allow you to buy and sell at a certain price. Our vanilla options also let you buy or sell BTC at the strike price. If it does not reach the price, you lose only the price. Is there any difference?

I am not sure. Could you walk me through an example of a call or put option using your interface?

I am a newbie. I'm not sure i'll invest but, I am interested in learning how it works.

I assume you want to buy vanilla options because you want to buy or sell at certain prices. Suppose you want to buy 0.01 BTC at 224 on April 26, you can buy a CALL option with strike price 224 and expiry time April 26.

OK, here is what you should do.

After you login, you first choose BTCUSD under "vanilla option" on the left side of the trading interface. Then you select the expiry date 2015-04-26. After that you fill the call order form.

In that form, you first set the Strike Price as 224. For the Order Type, you can choose market order because that allows your order executes immediately. For Amount, 1 contract means 0.01 BTC. Since you want to buy 0.01 BTC, you just put 1 there. Since it's a market order, you don't need to set a Price.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Our liquidity has recently doubled. There is even more liquidity coming. Stay tuned.  ;D

Yes liquidity looks good.

I also had the question about the amount.  Is that the BBO for the bid and ask price.  Or is it total amount for that strike price but some might be at 0.99654 .

I think I'll be joining your signature campaign.  It looks good and I realize how the ref works now.  I'll be glad to promote it.

Also you know that once liquidity ramps up you'll be able to offer a VIX.  Do you have plans with that as a goal?  You should work towards a VIX product. 

The amount shown is the total amount for that strike price. You are welcome to join our signature campaign. Yeah, once there is enough  trading volume, we will develop a VIX product.

Well that sounds exciting.  It's still probably quite far away.  You'll need to create more vanilla contracts and those will need to be liquid, and there's no point trading a vix if there's no liquidity.

Regarding total volume.  Is that in BTC, or contracts?

Also your UI is nice because its simple and its already quite complex for people who are completely new to options.  But do you plan on creating a more complex UI that'll give more information at your fingertips?  I actually don't have experience with options so I don't know how useful this would be.

Yeah, we still need to wait for a while. The volume is the number of contract. Each contract is 0.01 BTC at this moment. I am actually thinking about making the interface easier so that even completely new users can also use it.

Since you have given some good suggestions, you don't need to deposit and trade to get into the signature campaign.  ;D

The interesting thing about options is that you can make money when the price isn't volatile unlike futures or margin trading.




I think the vanilla contracts needs a bit of work.  Right now its really hard for me to understand the interface.

I sort of want to know the break even number.  I have to convert it into a percentage and then multiply it by the price to see the break even price.  Just seeing the price doesn't intuitively tell me a lot.  Maybe I need more experience.  But I think its a big barrier to entry.




Also I'm looking at the times of your contracts.  You have a nice range of times and they'll all line up eventually.

One thing that you could do better, is by creating a new contract when two times lines up.  Currently the 4 hour contract, and the one longer than that are both at the same expiration date.  With the same orderbook.  Instead you should create a new contract for that slightly longer expiration.

I'd suggest doing something similar to okcoin.  This way you won't have a time when all the contracts expire at the same time.

So okcoin does it by the biweekly rolls over into the weeklies, and then a new biweekly is made.  Eventually biweekly expiration will equal quarterly expiration.  When that happens they create a new quarterlies instead of having only two contracts open that week.



Lastly regarding fees, hopefully you'll be decreasing them in the future when you get more liquidity.  Currently I see room for improvement.  2% for binary options and 0.5% for vanilla options.  hm thats probably what's paying for the liquidity right now. 

Hey Wang,

Your site looks really cool. I will be funding my new account shortly and make some trades.

I see you are in Singapore, Anson Rd. I spent about a year trading index futures from Singapore ... even stood in the pits for several days. I sort of did it just to get the experience before the pits closed. Another era ...

Damn, you need a bit more transparency with how your index is calculated.  I hope you don't use btc-e.

I had 99 call/(short put) contracts at 10-15% at 248.  And damn it closed at 247.96.  (could have 6x-10x)



Yeah so you should think about implementing my suggestion about having the longer time frames create a new contract after they line up.  This way you won't eventually have the 4hr , daily, weekly, and biweekly all have the exact same expiry at one point.

And if you do implement that then you should consider adding an 8 hour binary option contract.

Sorry to see that you've lost a small amount. Your idea about time frames is brilliant. We are implementing it right now. Thanks!
About price index, we are right now calculating an average of all major exchanges's bid and ask weighted by their bid and ask amount. Currently, we include Bitstamp, BTC-E, and Bitfinex.

Did you get the timestamps working? 

I currently see two 2015-05-13 00:00 contracts.

Also BTCVIX (do you know him), he has some good feedback for your site.  He used to be an options trader and he's really big in the Bitcoin space.  He also might be interested in an interview.

Woah a ton of changes on coinut.  Do you have a full changelog?

Total 24 hours volume is 9982!!!

Hi, sending my first modest deposit right now. I'm going to start by selling longer-dated binary puts, and see how it goes. (I'm starting with only some of my online poker winnings, so I can afford to lose it ... lol.)

The very short-dated contracts - you are running them every 30 minutes it seems ... I'm thinking your system isn't going to be able to keep up amid the sort of volatility that BTC has seen in the past. Or maybe your system can keep up, but your liquidity provider will gap the spreads something crazy.

Still, I like your effort.

I would suggest offering very long-dated options, like stock option LEAPS. These best allow for hedging, and the time frame takes more of the short-term gamble out of it.

Sure, the short-term gamblers/traders will bring the volume and pay the bills. That is not me unfortunately, lol. I'd be most interested 3,6, 12-month contracts.

Yup looks like they created a 30 minute one for the gamblers.

They still have a 4 hour one, daily, weekly, biweekly/monthly (not sure)

Vanilla options just got added recently but I think they'll be adding more contracts in the future.  And before they add long term contracts they'll need to do mid term and then if they are able to get liquidity they'll be able to launch a VIX product.

Also interesting is that they changed option strikes from $2 to $4 which is good.  And they added some more strikes for the shorter term binary options.  I think that's also good and now more stuff can be traded.  Which means a nicer spread in prices.

So 30 min recently switched.  Index is at 236.48 so lets look at the cost of the contract.

1.63x for Calls
1.51x for puts

Those odds are actually quite good.  We'll have to see if the market maker needs to adjust.

And there's a vertical orderbook too so all the liquidity isn't right at the top.

I waiting for a full changelog since they made a lot of changes.

If you're interested in trading at coinut consider using my referral link in my signature.

Ok, I just made my first trade, and did the exact opposite of what I said I would do. Guess I am a gambler ... lol.

Sold some calls with a 237 strike, expiring in about 21 minutes ... lol, we'll see how it goes. I'm thinking whoever sold btc down a couple hours ago likely isn't done. Or more precisely, that is what I'm thinking everybody else is thinking. Twenty percent return in thirty minutes would be nice ... :-)

Famous last words ...

Hi, what do you mean by 'vertical order book' ?

I set up my Coinut account a couple days ago, not sure what link I used ... sorry.

good luck.  I've had some terrible luck

I had 99 6.17x CALLs with a strike of 248.  It ended up settling at 247.96

And another time I bought an out of the money call that was close to being positive but we just went sideways slightly under my strike.

Totally fine that you didn't use my ref link.

So currently it shows a strike price and the best bid, best ask, and the bid amount and ask amount.

Those liquidity amounts are for the whole order book.  If you place a limit order at the best bid or best ask I don't think you'll get a total fill.

It's hard for them to show that order book too as there isn't enough room.  But you can see it if you access the api.

OK, 22.8% profit in about 30 minutes, lol. That was fun ...  ;D

So this is how you create degenerate gamblers.

Interesting, I put on the same trade again, newest contract, and somebody narrowed the buy/sell spread dramatically.

The bid was higher than the ask ... no kidding. I was just about to take a screenshot when it disappeared. Must be multiple market makers. The opportunity wasn't huge, not sure if it would have exceeded trading costs ...

maybe OP could should shed some light on who / how many entities are making markets?

I'm a dye-in-the-wool degen poker player. Don't blame this site for my downfall ... lol.

I think there are multiple market makers.  It might also be a glitch.  It should have triggered right?

Also note that usually its the exact same but if someone has an order on only one, it might be better to buy a put then write a call.  And its the exact same for binary options. (but price might be different)

Yeah, it didn't trigger ... that was odd ... wish I had taken a screenshot. Anyway, I've made another deposit and I'll be on the site a bit. If I see it again I'll definitely take a screenshot right way ...

Ok, gotta beware here, because it appears the market makers play games. (Lol, that sounds funny, right? Its like discovering that politicians lie ...)

OP: What is going on here?

there is a bid for ~400 contracts at a stated price - lets say .00355.

I post a Sell Limit order for 50 contracts at .0035

I get filled 10 contracts at .00355

And I'm left with an open order for the remaining 40 while the bid has been pulled back to, let's say .00335.

It is like they are gaming my orders. That is not cool ...

Website isn't loading properly for me.

"Balance," "Margin," and "Free Margin" are in a perpetual 'loading' state, and there are no quotes for the near-term contracts.

Uh, ok my balances are back, but quotes on near contracts are absent ... hmmm.

Buyer beware, we are still in Beta ...

That's what I was trying to tell you about the other dimension of the orderbook.

You can see the full orderbook with the API.

Just because there's 400 contracts of liquidity doesn't mean its all at the top.  For the best bid and ask.

If you use the api you'll be able to visualize it but they probably do it like what you said, at increments.  And this way there will be liquidity when they remove some bids at the front of the book to shift price.

Well, if customers need to parse the API to get an accurate view of the order book then Coinut has lost 98% of its target market. Market makers specifically do this to game customer orders.

On a related note, Coinut needs to use a third party index, because their short-term calculations underlying the 30-minute contracts are ridiculously errant.

I've taken a 10-day position, and I'll probably be here for a bit, but I wouldn't (yet) recommend Coinut to others ...

I think they might have plans to change it up.

But currently they're showing quite a bit of information.

They're already showing the orderbook with the best bid and asks.

It is a misrepresentation, in my view. Right now it shows 746 of the 236 strike near contracts bid at .009 btc, but you can only sell about 10 contract at that price.

Lets just call it what it is: dishonest.

It says Bid amount - that's the amount of contracts bidding for the strike.

It also says best bid - that's the best bid price.

Hi guys. I am a n00b to options trading, so bear with me if my questions don't make sense.

I read on the net that if I have an asset, and I don't mind holding it, then I can write a call option so that I will either sell the asset with profit or keep the premium if the holder doesn't show up at expiry date. My questions are:

1. Can I write call option on coinut.om?
2. Can I set a premium?
3. Can I set expiry time?

On the web interface I only see 'Amount Bid Strike Ask Amount'

I've been on this for ~20 hrs and I don't see any parsing of the 'Amount' figures ...

What 'best bid' are you referring to?

You are describing a covered call, and yes, you can sell calls at Coinut against your deposited btc.

Do your own research, there is lots of information on the web about writing covered calls. And then start
by placing only a small position, so that you can see/experience firsthand how the position works its way to expiration.

I'm talking about the orderbook here.

https://coinut.com/

Hi,

There's two type of options on coinut.  Binary and Vanilla options. You want to use vanilla options.

Yup so what you're talking about is the covered call which is one of the first strategies people learn.

Yes you can write a call option on coinut.com

Currently you can choose between two expiry times.  Daily and Weekly.  (May 15, May 17)

You can choose the premium and strike price.  If you see the orderbook for vanilla options.  You can set an ask for fill a bid.

Currently there isn't a bid premium on daily, you might get a better premium on weekly.  Or you can place an ask but it'll take awhile to get filled.

Writing Vanilla options require margin.

Option Price + 0.01*Maximum ((40% * Underlying Price - Out of the Money Amount), (20% * Underlying Price))

Check out the site, to anyone reading this thread you can use the referral link in my signature.

That doesn't add anything, and I think you know that. Shame on you.

Coinut should add more digits to the bid/ask prices in order to give customers an accurate indication of contracts at the best bid/ask, instead of allowing market makers to game customer orders. Hmmm, maybe Coinut is the market maker ... that would make sense.

The full orderbook can always be queried using the API. For your convenience, we just added the interface for market depth to the trading interface. You just need to click the strike price to see.

Really cool huh, they just implemented a way to see the orderbook.

This is super cool guys! Count me a raving fan. I had faith that you were open to providing transparency here. I'm not a programmer, so the API doesn't do anything for me, but now in a very straightforward way everyone can see the order depth for each contract.

Also, previously I was PR in Singapore, and registered my own business there, so I recognize you guys are regulated pretty closely. I have a high level of trust for Singapore businesses, and I really want this service to work ...

On an unrelated note, I keep getting this error box every time I logout - how do I/we remedy?


Wt internal error: [Exception... "The connection does not exist"  nsresult: "0x804b000c (NS_ERROR_NOT_CONNECTED)"  location: "JS frame :: https://coinut.com/ :: h :: line 86"  data: no], code: undefined, description: undefined

Some reported that the timezone cannot be changed. Now the issue has been fixed. No need to calculate the time anymore!

Someone recently suggested having some sort of profit calculator for vanilla options.

Or maybe something that displays the risk profile.

I think that'd make it easier for people to understand the vanilla options.

Hi ... I'm sure you guys have lots of 'top priorities,' including marketing, but I'm wondering if you have any near-term plans to implement some type of portfolio margining, particularly for complex option strategies?

For example, because I'm a degenerate gambler and ultra bullish on btc, I used all my margin to sell binary puts. But that shouldn't preclude me from also selling calls for the same expiration, right? The two positions cannot simultaneously settle out-of-the-money. I know some brokers allow these types of positions with equity, index options and such. What are your thoughts?

Currently we don't directly provide strategies like strangle or straddle. However, you can manually open two positions to form a strangle or straddle strategy. They are in essence the same. If you want to hedge with the underlying asset, then you should have an account in exchanges like Bitfinex, Bitstamp or BTC-e.com. We will probably design an unified interface for all these kind of positions in the future. But as you said, right now our top priorities are other things like marketing.

Well one thing is that you used all of your margin so they can't give you some cause they don't know where you'll place them.

What if you used most of your margin for puts?  When you sell calls does it give you margin back?

Right, the margin calculation can be improved. Currently, we calculate all positions' margins separately.

That interview with BTCVIX should get you a lot of exposure.  Go contact him.

He's done these hangouts with OKCoin, Bitfinex, Huobi

Thanks, just sent to him a message.

Mr. Wang,

I'm struggling with the wide spreads and lack of liquidity - I'm sure you understand.

And ideal product from this customer's seat, and I think for your business prospects, look like this:

A. A small index futures contract on a recognized BTC price index. (List a new contract every 3 months, like other commodities.)

B. Index options, binary or vanilla, that settle on the index value.


I particular I would point to KOSPI Index futures & options (the most widely traded index in futures in the world), and 796xChange, as examples. I've traded both of those, and do so from time to time. I think a futures contract can drive much better volume for your options ...

Coinut is going to be on WCHangout tomorrow.

Tune in at 7 pm PST.  You'll also be able to watch it afterwards if you can't make it.


https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/36p25b/hangout_w_coinut_btc_options_platfrom_vanilla/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90HfrgZfPXM

So what happened with the marketmaker for the short term binary options?

Question:

If I am long ~12 contracts (same contract), bought at various times and various prices, and then I execute a separate 'sell' order of that same contract, will one of my existing contracts be sold, or will I be left with +12 contracts and -1 contract tying up 13 contract's worth of margin?

In other words, in order to exit a position must I use the 'close' button in the 'open positions' window?

Thanks.

Hope you guys are working on a reiteration of the trading page. After only a handful of positions the 'open positions' window becomes unwieldy. Rather than listing every single transaction separately perhaps you can consolidate positions by using an 'average price' and allow customers to filter via expiration, etc. Ultimately for a trader that is what is important, not all the accounting detail you are cramming in their now. That can be presented or made available somewhere else, in my view.

Thanks.

It seems Vanilla options have changed to $5 strikes which is useful.

And $0.25 strikes have been added to the half hour contracts.  Those are actually quite fun to play around with.  I've been quite successful with that.

I think they have plans to change the trading interface.

@Indamuch have you traded the 30 minute options? They're awesome.  Really good when we finally get volatility and move around.

It seems like the market maker needed to adjust their odds a bit too.

Well, for a couple days I had been raping the market maker on the 30-min binary options, so it doesn't surprise me that they have all but abandoned that effort. I'm saddened, but not surprised ...

Question for OP: Please tell us the algorithm for calculating your proprietary index:

How often is it re-calcuated?
What are the inputs?
What is the formula?

If you could be precise, that would be most appreciated.

Lol I've been raping the market maker quite well too.  They've added the $0.25 strikes so its a lot more fun.

The market maker is missing sometimes but its still up for playing.

One rule of thumb for people is that during low volatility times you want buy out of the money options really cheaply when you think it might move soon.

And during high volatility times you buy in the money options when you're convinced on a direction.  Since out of the money is still freaking expensive during those times.

As for the formula its supposed to be based off of Bitfinex, btc-e , and bitstamp.  It's a bit more complex than that.  Hopefully they'll be a give more information on the index or rework it. 

But thinking about it as an average helps.  And you're also just trading the index.  Yesterday the volatility on it was crazy.  And volatility would be really cheap too.  You just need to do some range bound trading.  Index gets to the top of the range, and then load up on puts. 

Got my withdrawal processed really quickly!

Also they recently did another audit and they have 22 more btc in their wallets.

And 24 hour volume is at 29k.

Withdrawals are quick, yes.

But it is currently impossible to download historical activity or current positions to excel ... and the site doesn't provide any performance stats.

These are basic features for a trading site guys. It is currently too unwieldy to keep track of any sizeable portfolio of positions.

And what is the formula for your index????

How often is it recalculated?!?

If only your market makers know these details, you've built in an advantage for them ...

Your shilling is a bit too obvious Chris ... not necessarily reassuring.

Specifically about vanilla options:

Is there time & sales available, volume and open interest?

It is obvious there is a single market maker as you can click on the strike and see the depth.  Of course, they can collude to limit the availability at each price but this is unlikely. 

Also, without portfolio risk being implemented, you are unlikely to attract serious MM as the amount required to trade a significant amount brings credit risk to the forefront.

It escaped me why the pricing doesn't work and can explain the confusion.  Strike prices are set in U.S. Dollars but the options are priced in Btc.  If you look at this CME quote page for currencies, you will see they are all priced in USD/Per 1 foreign unit.  Here:

http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/fx/ (http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/fx/)

The options are the same way.  To use Btc as capital in this case, switch to Btc per 1 USD, set contract size and strike prices.  This would make much easier for people to know what they are paying.

So what are you saying, price contracts in dollars?

I think they're having a UI update.  But currently the best way you can get this info is that before you place an order it'll tell you the breakeven settlement price.

Mr. Wang,

I know you guys are working on a lot. Just want to illustrate how your current margin regime is limiting your trading volume.

Right now I have a strangle on using binary options, and I'm prepared to hold the entire position through expiration.

With this position I should have 1/2 margin available, which I would like to be trading the 30-min contracts ... but you've tied my hands by requiring margin on both the call and put-sides of my position.

I think you understand ... thanks.

Yeah, someone mentioned this complex margin calculation in this thread. We will be definitely working on it soon. Thank you for the suggestions.

Mr. Wang,

You might consider presenting your platform on Elitetrader.com (ET).

Lots of experienced options traders discuss strategies there, and some have familiarity with BTC as well. For many traders the actual underlying asset is almost irrelevant, as you probably know. ET readers do trade in reasonable volume. Not sure how much ET will let you promote before hitting you up for a paid banner or such.

In your shoes I would be letting everybody on ET know what you have. A handful of those guys are very, very seasoned traders ... with some prop and institution background.

ET has a sub-forum dedicated to Options and one dedicated to Cryptocurrency as well. You might begin by starting a thread in each, and see where it goes.

Within the last 60 minutes I've 'opened' several trades (binary options) that failed to execute. I even crossed the market, my order is still 'opened' but never executed ...

Having trouble saving screenshots ... can't be bothered with it, and giving up for the moment.

Just PMed you. Please check.

you mean you didn't get filled?  I have many ghost orders that stay in my open orders occasionally even after I cancelled them.  I click cancel again to make sure.

Also I'd be interested in an open interest statistic.  Wondering if its possible to incorporate that.

His problem has been fixed. Chriswen, are you using the API to cancel the orders? If you cancel through the interface only, there should be no problem. But there is some issue in the synchronization between API and the interface.

Open interest will be added within this week. We are busy with that.

Just added two tutorials about how to trade options in Coinut.com
https://coinut.com/how-to-trade

Hi,

I witnessed a bit of a bug where the index was at $150.  It's slightly worrying.  Hopefully when you get the problem resolved you can offer an explanation.

I just sent them an e-mail with screenshot. You might sell some puts near the $140 level ... they are bidding a good price!

I'm not sure those transactions would be honored though ...

I got some calls at $160.  I think its because of btc-e being down.  They should get it fixed and this problem shouldn't happen again.

Indexed fixed.  0613 marketmaker still has bids and asks down there.

As some of you have noticed, BTC-e was down and its price become zero in our server. That's why you saw our price index dropped quite a lot. All positions with the price around 150 will be canceled. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Okay that's completely understandable.

WIll this problem be fixed if exchanges go down in the future?

Thank you for your understanding. Yes definitely. We've fixed the issue. We are now using Bitfinex and Bitstamp. If BTC-e.com comes back again, we will still use it. If all Bitfinex, Bitstamp, and BTC-e.com are down together, which is really rare, we will pause trading immediately.

I finally spent some time familiarizing with the vanilla options ... I'm guessing Coinut is getting minimal volume with these?

The structure and pricing is not intuitive at all. For example, if we look at the 225 calls priced at .000511/.000619 ... it is not immediately clear at what level one would be profitable on either side. (Yes we can do the calculations, but nobody wants to be punching their calculator in a fast market.) Perhaps the contract size would work better at 0.1 btc, with the option prices stated in US$? The prices would be convertible to btc at the moment of order submission, at the current index value.

Currently I use the binary options to position for a flat-to-rising market. If I want to hedge or take a speculative long, for the time being I would probably look elsewhere ...

Before you make an order you'll get a confirmation page and it'll ask for the breakeven price.

If I cannot see, at a glance, where the market is at, across different strikes and timeframes, I'm not going to bother 'making an order.' There are other instruments/markets that do this better.

Not to mention ... not sure I'm comfortable trusting a new site and their untested margin regime. Note margin requirements - arbitrarily set - are subject to changes 'based on market conditions.' I haven't seen any explanation of how margin calls will be handled. Likely they are automated to some degree ... uggh.

The margin was pretty conservative. It is not arbitrarily set. Currently, the market makers need to use about 40% of the notional value as margin to write a vanilla option contact. We monitor the margin level every 5 minutes. If margin calls happen, we first cancel the user's orders, and if this is still not enough, the user's positions will be closed using market orders. This is stated in the FAQ under the question "What if the seller defaults".

How automated is that process? If Btc-e goes down again and the index goes kilter ... are these margin calls triggered?

By 'arbitrarily set' I'm referencing the fact that derivatives exchanges routinely change the margin requirements on their contracts. Of course they will cite reasons, but the changes will always seem arbitrary to others.

My point is, you DO have the option of changing the margin requirements at any time, though at 40% it sounds like that shouldn't be necessary.

Next few days I will set up a second account to play with the vanilla options a bit. Have a look ...

I understand your concerns. We've fixed the bug about the price jump after a price source goes down. So you won't be able to see that again.

Currently, it is unlikely for us to change the margin requirement because the volatility right now is pretty low. But if it rises much higher later, we may need to raise the margin requirement. So we cannot say that we will fix the margin level and never change. Of course, if change is needed, we will notify all the vanilla option writers before the change to make sure they will have enough time to add more money to protect their positions.

Yes, you are welcome to try our vanilla option at anytime. BTW, I traveled last weekend, so you will see the volume and open interest within this week.

Just listened to the Whaleclub interview on youtube ... well done.

Glad to hear that you are familiar with ThinkorSwim ... I'm excited for Coinut's potential. Please keep us updated on developments including site development, bringing on additional market makers, and possibly investment partners.

Looks like they added chinese functionality.

50k volume today which is quite a spike.  I'm wondering where this is being traded.

Also your market maker seems to be having margin requirement problems or something.  Vanilla orderbooks look thin.

In the interview Mr. Wang seemed to indicate that Coinut is currently acting as their own market maker, but they are looking for someone, or others, to take on that roll. Specifically he said multiple times that they are 'using a modified black-scholes option pricing model.' The platform itself has no need for such a model, only the market maker does. So if they are using the model, they must be making the markets.

Hence the elephant in the room here: we are currently trading against Coinut itself, which has a severe information advantage and the power to make ad-hoc adjustments such as how the index is calculated and compiled, as well as margin requirements. Look through the progression of this thread and it is clear they've change the composition of their index at least once. And an aberrant move in that index did trigger their automatic margin call mechanism, at least once. It only takes 'once' to wipe some traders out ...

To be clear, I love the potential here, but they have a long way to go, and until they are able to address these kinds of things, there is reason to be cautious.

We changed the price index because originally we used the bid, ask amount as the weights, and it was manipulated by one smart guy. He put big orders in an exchange and immediately canceled them. This was repeated very frequently, and the result was that the final index biased toward that exchange. To avoid being manipulated again, we changed the index. However nobody received a margin call.

Now, we've fully disclosed our price index, and we will never manipulate the index. We currently have a few market makers. But we cannot disclose their identities for privacy issues. The point is, no matter who you are trading with, we will make the exchange transparent and fair. If you have any suggestions that can make this better, we will be glad to take.

BTW, we just added two important metrics. One is the Volume, and the other is the Open Interest. Please take a look.

Good observation! Yeah, we are going to expand to China soon. Hopefully, you will see more transactions and liquidity.  ;D

Nice that you added this.

You also removed the quantity stat but as people said before that wasn't the most useful stat and you can still see the orderbooks.

It would seem that you get a lot of volume on the 30 min contracts.

Yes also about the price index.  It's completely open now.  Average of bid price and ask price on Bitfinex, btc-e, and Bitstamp.  No more weird weighting.  Quite a good decision.

Mr. Wang,

It appears that you changed the index composition in the dark ... without telling anybody. Is that the case?

You cannot sell financial instruments tied to a stated index, and then secretly change that index, no matter how minor, or good your intentions.

I know your intentions were good, but you open yourself to charges of fraud ... and those might be hard to refute.

If you change the index composition, it needs to be announced in advance, in a transparent manner.

I was concerned about index manipulation as well, hence my questions about it. Glad to see you were aware, and happy to see the recent updates!

This looks like your automated margin call system was triggered by some aberration to your in-house calculation of the index. I believe he posted this before you began offering vanilla options. If he had a portfolio of vanilla options, in addition to seeing his open orders cancel your system likely would have auto-liquidated him with market orders. Basically that could have wiped him out ... because of glitched up systems. This is the type of risk I think about when considering your vanilla options ...

Well considering that they were able to roll back all the orders I have trust that they'll be able to fix problems. (during index bug)

Also I've been writing options and the margin requirements feel fine. I've also realized that while buying options gives you inherent leverage, selling options is the exact opposite.  You take a return but with risk.

Also I've recently placed a withdrawal request, lets see how long it'll take to process on a Sunday.

I have made a script so that you can chart the index. I am just using the close price and not ask or bid since I do not have that info. At least you can lay it on top of another exchanges candles and get an idea where the index is.
https://www.tradingview.com/script/SpPMcsQh-COINUT-INDEX-BITCOIN-OPTIONS/

Yeah, but option sellers are not agreeing to take on 'fuck'd up system risk.'

My worst fear is that they build a meaningful customer base, get some real momentum, and then their index calculation goes awry and they erroneously liquidate thousands of clients. Etc. etc ... I was trading on Bitfinex during the extreme market conditions a year ago, and that leading exchange simply shut down their trading engine, and/or turned off their margin mechanism, on a couple of occasions. They came out of it more robust, and I still trade there, but that is not ideal by any means. It cost me a few thousand US$, and no, there was no recourse.

Coinut only has one reputation to lose. I'd rather we held them to the fire NOW, and they address these critical things while their reputational risk is still low, than later, when the 'cost' is likely to be much higher.

I'm wondering if there's a flaw in the margin requirements.  I sold some puts.  I'm wondering why that now that the price has gone up my margin requirement has also went up even though theoretically they should be more safe.

I'm guessing your margin requirement has risen by about 10%, no?

Earlier I believe he said they've set the vanilla margin requirement at '40% of the underlying principal.' Forty percent of $250/btc is MORE than forty percent of $230/btc. Be careful, if the btc price keeps rising, you could get a margin call on your short puts!?! How's that for 'f*ck'd up system risk?'

I haven't touched the vanilla options, don't believe I will.

We are checking this. You guys are quite early. Before you guys, there were seldom options sellers. Will fix this issue soon.

The vanilla option margin problem should have been fixed.

What changes did you make?

Lol ...

It's a surprise!

Guys, there is no surprise. It's still
Option Price + 0.01*Maximum ((40% * Underlying Price - Out of the Money Amount), (20% * Underlying Price))
Originally, the sign of Out of the money amount is wrong. We just fixed it.

Just reduced the number of strikes to 20.

Well I'm glad you got that fixed.


You think that is enough strikes for the 30 minute binary option?

For everything else I think its a good change.  Usually it centers where you want it to be when you log in but not always.  This probably makes the user experience a lot better.

Most of the time, there is only liquidity for 9 strike prices including the 30 minute binary options. So 20 should be quite enough. Later we may add customization so that you can choose 5, 10, 20, 40 etc.

Just added a new function. You can download your history information now.

Someone's been doing quite a bit of retail trading on Coinut.  Some nice poisson distributions.

This website is a complete scam.  In addition to previously acting as the sole liquidity provider, changing the exchange calculations without notice, a stunning lack of transparency, and technical bugs costing traders money, the site now prevents users from closing out open positions.  Do not deposit any money whatsoever to this scam of a website.

Well I guess it does not matter since I am just an "ass clown", but I have made over 175% on my profile in 2 days, so I do not think my criticism comes from a place of bad intent.  The closing positions error occurs due to incorrect margin requirements, which the site has promised to fix.  Also, the API also stopped working today due to some SSL verification error, but since I am just an "ass clown", I guess my opinion does not matter at all.  Thanks for your constructive post Indamuck, no need to verify your facts before slinging baseless slander!

Welcome to my ignore list ass clown. Have a nice day.

I will! Thank you for the kind wishes  :)  Made over $250 trading on Coinut in the past 2 hours, so I'd say it is a great day so far

You know what, I actually thought the clown was you Indamuck because you were the only person complaining about all these things.

Sorry :)

Little secret for you Chris: I don't give a sh*t what you think of me. But thanks for sharing ...

I guess Indamuck is really grumpy all the time and curses to hide the apparent lack of any substantial vocabulary.  And clearly Indamuck cares what Chris thinks because Indamuck took the time to respond to the post.  If Indamuck really did not care, Indamuck would not have responded.  Also, API and position closing bugs are fixed, hooray!

I have a feature request. I want to be able to have a risk profile for all your options positions combined. So you could realize your profit at different points visualized.

To make that easier you might want to do that other suggestion that someone mentioned which was for consolidating different positions at the same strike together into one average price to make it a lot less easier visually.

So that'll simplify the calculation. And I think that visualization would be very useful.

Obviously different expiry dates will need separate risk profiles. But it'd be interesting if you could also combine the binary options if they expire at the same strike.

And this risk profile would probably be togglable so its not showing for people who don't want it.

Another reason I think this is useful is because options are quite a complex product and this'll help visualize them a bit and sort of inform them about these complex strategies they can use.

Oh and another thing is the complex margin calculation, what's the progress on that?

Also what is your thoughts on having a different initial margin and maintenance margin?

I also have a question. When you close positions do you still have to pay a fee?

Nice! You doing it on 30 minute binaries? Most action over there.

Suggestion for the binary options:

Instead of a flat .0002 trading fee, make it the lesser of .0002 and 20% of the contract price. Thus a contract that is bought/sold for .0009 would only charge a fee of 20%*.0009=.00018

And a contract that trades for .0002 would only cost a fee of .000040

This change will encourage bigger volumes on your lowest price contracts. Currently I see contracts quoted for prices that are less than the transaction cost, which makes little sense, unless of course your aim is to limit trading.

Yeah that sounds good. Yeah I think smaller fees would be good. But a 0.0002 fee for 50% contracts is actually completely reasonable on a binary options contract.

Smaller fees would allow trading on further out strikes while collecting the same amount of fees on the closer strikes so they're getting extra revenue.

Also is there a fee for closing positions? You don't have a fee for exercising so I think no fee on closing would be a good idea. And you already charged them a fee for opening the position.

So with your proposal of 0.0002 or 20%.  MIN(0.2*contract price, (1-contractprice)*0.2)

Equilibrium price is a contract price of 0.001, I think it's perfectly reasonable. It's won't be effecting your fees that much and it's causing more volume.

Actually I'd recommend a 15% fee because with both maker and taker 40% is quite a big portion.

And equilibrium price is still 0.0013333 so you shouldn't have a problem.

Or you could consider some sort of fee that's not equal.  So that the person who's risking more, 0.009 btc has a smaller fee and the person who's getting 10x doesn't get as much of a fee reduction. Because for them even though the fee is a big portion of the contract, it's a small amount of the reward they're getting. So it would be based on the reward you get.

Yeah, these are nice suggestions. Right now, there is no fee for either closing or exercising a position. We will definitely consider making it proportional to the price in the future. But it will require a little more research.

Why don't you wear our signature campaign? I think you will gain some registrations and thus earn some commissions in additional to the campaign payment.

Yeah, you should also consider something similar for vanilla options too. The spread right now is actually just the fee.  It's actually a $1 fee.  So do your research. I don't want to hurt your business but smaller spreads on options should lead to more trading.  Also a smaller fee for far out of the money strikes would also be good. That way you could be able to trade those.

I've thought about it. Two issues for me: First, in the short-to-medium term I think BitBingo pays better. Second, if I campaign with Coinut and a referral link, I will likely post some instructional stuff, which would require more of my time. And right now I DON'T want people imitating me because I could get crowded out.

And finally, I'm concerned you guys are vulnerable to competition. Currently your functionality remains quite primitive, and I'm thinking there are a few guys/teams looking to do you one better. It doesn't appear you have a credible, direct competitor at the moment, but rest assured one is on the way.

The first reason is quite understandable. Regarding the second one, we know that we still need to add a lot more functionalities. But we have built a very strong foundation. We have very efficient backend and frontend. We have designed our system in a very flexible way so that many functions can be added without much difficulty. We just need you guys to suggest what you want. A few days ago, you guys told us you need the volume and open interest metrics and less strike prices etc. We just implemented them. So our team is always here doing our best to make the platform professional and easy to use.

Just fixed the withdrawal form. Now you will get notified if an invalid Bitcoin address is used.

Lol .. ok thanks.

(I sent a couple withdrawal requests today with address that was missing a digit ... my guess is he's referring to that.)

You we are welcome.  :)

Here's some insight for your business. Today I withdrew half my balance ... in order to send it to 796 xChange and sell the FTSE China A50 contract they have now. The A50 was down some 8% on the day this afternoon ... but I missed the bulk of it, of course.

Ideally Coinut was a derivatives exchange, and not just an options exchange. Then many of your traders could consolidate trading on your site. Futures+Options are a perfect fit, especially with portfolio margining. I would MUCH prefer NOT to be sending my coins all over the place in search of a good trade - ideally they were all under one roof.

Sure, futures will definitely be our next derivative.

Well those shouldn't be hard to find market makers for.

But you'll have the question of either doing socialized losses or not allowing a lot of leverage.

There's been quite a bit of volume on longer term binary options.

I would think not a lot of it was self trading. They only do self trading when it moves really quickly and probably not very likely.

And someone amassed a decent position on biweeklies.

Oh yeah, my open interest doesn't seem to be displaying for weeklies vanilla options.

Please can we download our open positions? Keeping track of them with pencil and paper has gotten old real fast ...

You can currently do this with the API.

You could probably make a nice Excel sheet if you wanted to. I know some people have some sheets set up for Bitmex.

Or you can get a program to do it for you.

Thanks but I'm not a programmer, and I don't care to learn. If Coinut expects/requires every customer to program their own data dump ... they are dead in the water. I think you know this Chris ... just fulfilling your sig campaign quota ... lol. Keep up the good work.

I learned BASIC on a TRS-80, then never picked it up again. Lol ...

you know, I was actually going to put the coinut in my sig anyways but since they have a signature program I might as well do it.

Also do sites usually give you data dumps of open orders?

And I could possibly try doing something. I don't know VBA at all but maybe it won't be too difficult. I really wanted a risk profile for all my positions.

As you guys requested just lowered down the commission fee for vanilla options to 0.00002 BTC. Enjoy trading.

Open positions have no download function at this moment. If many request, we will definitely add.

Thank you very much for implementing this. I think this is a very beneficial change. Before vanilla option fees were taking up quite a big part of the cost. Also the fee represented a $1 move which is quite significant for a fee, that's not even the spread. Now the fee is a bit more reasonable, it'll allow people to have an easier time trading.

Price index is too easy to manipulate.  Have been playing with it the past few days to see if I could affect some movements on the Coinut site, and although it is not by much, I usually only need to adjust it a few cents for binaries in order to swing a losing trade into a winning trade at the end of the window.  Will be hard to find serious market makers when the price is so easy to manipulate with much less than 1 BTC.  Really should use last trade price as this is a much more accurate representation of where the market currently sits.

I wonder if biweekly binary contracts would be able to hedge their position.  With enough liquidity they have a nice curve that they could hedge with.

Did we scare off the market maker?

This is my concern:

In the interview it was mentioned that Coinut was capitalized out of the founder's pockets in the amount US$100k. If in fact they are the primary market maker, and their 'modified Black-Scholes model' doesn't work well with Bitcoin in the short-medium term, I could see Coinut burning cash quickly ... and then all bets are off.

Just understand that when you deposit and trade here, there are many more risks involved than simply where the bitcoin price is headed. As Chris mentioned there are currently no quotes for the binary options except for the nearest 30-min and 1-hr contracts ...

If Coinut is the market maker, they can very easily manipulate the price index to work against the major money so that Coinut profits on every trading window.  No point in investing until the market maker identity is known.  I have asked many times, and find it dubious at best that Coinut refuses to identify the market maker.  Transparency is key in these new marketplaces, and without the transparency, Coinut very well could be the market maker, as well as the price index setter, which has been pointed out in prior posts as a major concern

I'm quite sure that they have third party market makers.

A few weeks ago the market maker's bot for the daily contract had some serious malfunctions and I was able to ramp up 1 BTC to 22 BTC at expiry. It was quite a grave concern for them. I could have withdrawn, but wangxinxi acted as an intermediary and asked if I could give the marketmaker another chance. 22 BTC was quite a lot for that marketmaker and coinut doesn't have that much volume at the time. So he said the marketmaker was offering a bounty. I made a counter offer and asked for a bit more. And well the market maker agreed.

Well, it seems like he decided to leave now. Coinut has different market makers on the 30 minute and the vanilla options. Actually I believed the weekly, and biweeklies was using a different market maker also. They offer incentives to the market makers for providing liquidity but if the market makers don't feel like it they can stop market making. Now Coinut is going to need to find some new market makers.

Maybe, I should have been betting less and work on bringing in new users first. Now it's going to be hard with a market maker MIA.

Or it could be that the market maker had some sort of trigger that shut down their system. Maybe the markets are just too volatile right now for them to make markets currently.

The price index is based on the bid and ask for bitfinex, bitstamp, and btc-e.

I've talked to them and while they don't disclose the identities of the market makers, I believe that they're separate identities.

Bitmex has marketmakers too and they aren't known. I think they have no obligation to disclose who their market makers are.

So really it boils down to the price index.

I think to promote transparency coinut should have a page with a chart for the historical index prices.

That'll promote transparency because you'll know the historical settlement prices. You'll be able to check those numbers. And you'll also be able to check if the historical index matches your exercise price.

Secondly Coinut should add a page with all their current price inputs, similar to okcoin.

https://www.okcoin.com/marketList.do

So then you could verify their live data and their live index to see if it matches up.

It seems quite problematic to simply apply black-scholes to bitcoin, given the wild swings in volatility. Bitcoin was built for volatility. You might say it was built to break black-scholes. Market maker has to be either very seasoned, or very deep pockets to make this work. Coinut is NEITHER seasoned NOR deep pockets. They are PHd students getting carried away with their thesis ... lol. I'm hoping this works ... but I'm not overwhelmed by the odds.

Btw, nice score Chris. Apparently you were paying closer attention than me ... Do you mean to say you gave some of your profits back to the market maker?!?

Yeah I returned the a big chunk of the profits. 20 BTC would've been nice. It was right when they released the volume indicators. The marketmaker would switch from buying put options at 0.00875 to selling put options deep in the money for cheap or something like that. And then it would switch back so that you can sell some back to raise my capital so I could do more each time.

Anyways the marketmaker wasn't too happy about that. And well they were going to leave so I gave some back, since I really wanted the platform to grow. But it looks like they left anyways.

As for black scholes, I think 30 minute pricing makes sense. Even the cheap options, if you keep buying them during a flat market, bitcoin can actually stay flat. And they lose money that one time there's volatility but then the pricing will change.

Also I was wondering about weeklies and biweeklies. They're actually quite expensive for out of the money options. I think you should be able to hedge it especially if you sell binary options on a wide range of strikes.

Btcoracle uses some sort of trading engine to do their odds.

I also think if you're marketmaking you should dynamically price based on demand, to help hedge your position. Also if everyone's buying call options you make them more expensive. That helps reduce exposure.

Sounds like a simple case of inexperience on the market maker's part. Or, that may have been a minor thing, and they left for other reasons. Anyway, I'm trading futures for the time being ... hope Coinut can pull this together.

It's funny. Mr. Wang was over on the Gambling sub-forum here touting how someone made over 20 btc. Does it really count if you gave it back? Lol ...

Well he said 10 btc on twitter.

So orders are now back.

WangXinXi we need an explanation.

Its a brand new site and they and their partners are still ironing out the wrinkles. I don't need more than that.

Every hurdle they overcome makes them more robust. Nice ...

Definitely will need an explanation.  What sort of benefits do market makers enjoy?  Would potentially be interested if some technical fixes were made and the conditions were correct

Hi guys, sorry for the recent shortage of liquidity for some of the binary options. One of the market makers felt it was too risky due to the big fluctuations a few days ago. But now we have discussed with him and he just turned back, and he promised not to do so in the future and he is also improving the market making program to make it more robust. Anyways, we will try our best to find more and more good market makers for you guys to trade with.

BTW, for vanilla options, we will release straddle or strangle shortly, so you can directly short or long volatility. Stay tuned!

For some of you who don't know how to call me, you can call me Xinxi (my Chinese given name), Andy (my English name), Mr. Wang, or Dr. Wang (yes, I have graduated already and I've been working on this fullltime for about one year ;D).

Yeah these additional options will be interesting.

I sort of like trading in one direction and picking two directions takes even longer to break even but I'm sure this will be nice for some people.

Also if you're interested in shorting this is really useful because instead a maximum of 40% margin requirement you'll only require a maximum of 20% margin.

Also it seems like he really did make some changes to the program. I bought 125 binary options for biweekly and now premiums are jacked up. But he didn't exactly price the puts better.

Hi Andy,

Hope you can build some flexibility into your strangle/straddle margining regime.

For example, I may sell puts today, and then sell calls for the same expiration a few days later. I would like to get straddle or portfolio margining on the position, as only one half of the position can expire in-the-money. Currently you are charging us 2x the required margin. I would be trading a lot more if you had this, and that probably holds true for many of your other customers as well.

Andy, this is a good use case for the straddle.

Note that in this case they're not doing the straddle at the beginning. Since you're making this feature already, make it so that the strikes can be set apart. Also you don't need to place the orders at the same time. You can combine them after the fact to get the cheaper margin. You can also uncombine them if you want to close one part of the straddle whenever.

Hey guys, just made the option chain sheet much more readable. No more annoying scrolling. Just choose to show 5, 10, or 15 strikes. Enjoy trading!

Interesting change, 20 list is a bit small.

Ah just made a retarded trade and donated 1+ BTC to the 30 min marketmaker.

hi i transfer some btc to my account, but my balance still shows 0.0 after 30 minutes,
how much time it takes to process ? Thanks.

my account is ssstand

Well transactions are taking awhile to confirm because of blocks being full. Did you have a fee?

Coinut requires 3 confirmations which usually takes half an hour. This is not always the case and it make take longer than that due to variance.

You are going to ask for a refund, right? Lol ...

It usually takes about half an hour or a little longer to confirm. Your withdrawal arrived a few hours ago. Please check. In the future, you can use blockchain.info/address/{your deposit coinut address} to see the number of confirmations.

What exactly constitutes a "promise" from the market maker? Is there some sort of contract? Some penalty to the market maker for leaving? Or is it just the word of the market maker? Because in that case then you don't have a reliable market maker.

Yes, we have a contract. You requested to show how we calculate the price index. We will show you in realtime the ticks of the three exchanges and the calculated average together so you don't have to worry again.

Some users seem to be unaware that many many blockchain transactions are taking MUCH longer than normal due to a recent software upgrade. SStand - check out Reddit/bitcoin for details .. From what I read these delays should be resolved in 2-3 days or so. That is the hope/expectation anyways.

With all this hashpower mining the wrong chain, there is probably going to be a significant difficulty retargeting.

I have got my deposited coin, thanks !


however i am new to the Binary options, i don't understand
why i bought various CALL and when it arrives the time the
price are upper than the strike price but i see my balance remains
the same, but i have seen this is the buying button

BTC/USD at the expiry time ≥ 266.75   0.01 BTC(payoff)   0.00500000 BTC (profit)

that means each amount i bought returns me 0.005 btc more,
however the balacne remains the same, is the correct ?

i am wonder what happens if i lose them on PUT options..

You just submitted some orders. And the orders were not filled. You need to make sure the orders are filled. You can do so either buy using market orders or using limit orders with good prices.

Hi guys, for some of you who wants to know our index better, we just prepared a page for you https://coinut.com/index. It has all exchanges' bid and ask prices that we use updated in realtime.

could you explain more detaily what do you mean with good prices ?
i have chosen already with "limit order" in the order type with 0.005 prices each amount

Market orders are usually filled immediately, but the price totally depends on the current market condition. Limit orders let you control your price, but you may need to wait. To get immediate fill with limit orders, if you buy, make sure the price is high enough; if you sell, make sure the price is low enough. You can read the slides on the home page to get a detailed introduction on how to place orders.

In order for you to BUY something, there must be someone willing to SELL it to you.

I can make offers all day to buy houses in my neighborhood for $10. Nobody will accept my offer, so I will never get 'filled.' Just because I made an offer, or multiple offers, does not mean I am entitled to a fill. I must find a willing seller at my price.

If you are trying to buy a contract and you see that the best offer is for .0075 btc, and you bid .0050, your bid will not get 'filled', at least initially. At that moment nobody is willing to sell at that low price. Once you've sent an order, ALWAYS follow up on whether your order was filled. If it wasn't filled, your order is still likely broadcast on the exchange and you might want to cancel it.

Just look at the market maker's orders. Fill one of those. I just do a limit order for that price. I usually will get a fill, but if the price moves I'm okay with that too.

i found this metaphor very helpful, thanks !

Would be awesome if you had a chart page showing your price index over time

Woah you're adding yearly Vanilla options!!

EDIT: (or 6 months)

EDIT2: Fill my orders please

EDIT3: Indamuck you were asking for LEAPs right?

Also this site wants to compete with you. They're planning to launch a US based options platform (but nothing right now).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41hCIYNS5mI

Also they plan to do American options.

You are pretty quick! Those options expire every 180 days.

Welcome ;D

Awesome. Actually I withdrew all my balance several days ago to trade futures given the recent volatility. Time to log back in and have a look.

Yeah futures volatility is awesome.

I have a balance on bitmex (quanto futures), okcoin (20x) , and coinut (binary options and vanilla options).

Anyways I don't really go all in anyways. And all the products are a bit different.

Also Binary Leaps available now too.

Got a 1 340 put fill at 0.009

Also they strikes were changed on 180 day binary options.

Makes sense. $16 strikes now to make it compatible with biweeklies.

You just won't see the $340 open interest until a day before expiration.

For futures I'm only using 796 Exchange at the moment. One thing I really like is there is that the futures contract usually trades at a large premium/discount to spot. So I trade directionally, but also use prem/disc as a decision input. Also, they are trying to launch a CFD tied to Mainland PRC stocks. I think they've curtailed trading (?) due to crazy volatility of late, but I've traded that contract a bit and would love for it to gain some traction.

What are your thoughts on Okcoin vs. Bitmex? I've briefly looked at both, but haven't taken the plunge yet. Bitmex didnt' excite me because their homepage was too 'busy' and their futures contract pretty much traded at spot. The Bitmex principals are from 'sell side' wall street and I got turned off by the 'pitch' of all the noise on their site. That said, the founder writes a decent newsletter, and I appreciated his last one calling for a run to $300 before a pullback etc. etc. ... will confess I switched more bullish after I read it.

Okcoin ... I just read about several recent departures among their senior staff, questions about their audits (?), and decided not to bother. I'm already trading with one Chinese exchange, probably don't need to double my headaches.

Yeah futures usually trade at a premium. I also use that as an indicator, if it's too big I won't enter a position. Might miss something but nothing wrong with that.

Trading the Shanghai index is interesting but I have absolutely no experience with it, I'll stick to trading BTC. Have you heard of 1broker (ref link) (https://1broker.com/m/r.php?i=3799)? You can trade all sorts of CFDs with Bitcoin. Up to 200x leverage on forex. S&P 500, DAX 30, Dow Jones (20x). 11 stocks, and they'll be adding more (15x leverage).

I use Okcoin and Bitmex for different things. I think Okcoin is a lot more comparable to 796. The okcoin futures platform is really the most liquid one. Up to 20x leverage. I think there's more liquidity and tighter spreads then 796.

On the other hand Bitmex doesn't have a lot of liquidity. Price discovery isn't really done their, but you trade with the market makers on their. Bitmex offers two types of futures contracts. They have the XBU inverse futures which is basically the exact same thing Okcoin and 796 has. They only offer 2.5x leverage on those so it might not be your thing. XBU futures also don't have a lot of liquidity. There's Daily, Monthly Quarterly, Quarterly, 6 month.

Bitmex also has the XBT Quanto futures, these are designed so that as the price goes up you'll make more money then with traditional futures. Inverse futures, each contract is worth 1 USD. For quanto, 0.00001 XBT per 1 USD (Currently 0.0032 XBT per contract). They have some graphs to show the difference. So I'm bullish which is why I like trading XBT futures. Because of how it's structured, there's a slight premium. There's monthly, quarterly, and 6 month. There's a lot more liquidity on Quanto. You should be able to do scalps on the monthly contract. Make sure you take into account the premium, it fluctuates quite a bit. XBT Quanto offers up to 10x leverage.

Also unlike 796 and okcoin, they margin call you in parts. They don't take leftover money. Bitmex doesn't offer extremely high leverage, 10x is decent, but it's well suited for longer term contracts (No one else offers 6 months). They also have a unique product with XBT Quanto futures which gives you the opportunity to make more money in a bullish market.

Bitmex Sign-Up (https://www.bitmex.com/register/Kz2wa6)
Okcoin Sign-up (https://www.okcoin.com/?invid=2033157)

Sorry about that, OKcoin is going through some heavy DDOS attacks last night.

Also Coinut removed the 4 hour and daily binary contracts which I think is a horrible idea.

You say you want to drive liquidity to contracts, but having contracts constantly expire, that brings volume. Having contracts expire faster will bring more volume. And users have a need for shorter contracts.

Also I have serious doubt about 6 month liquidity. That's a massive lockup period of capital. Maybe you should transition to 3 month or 4 month. You'll get extra volume like that too. 6 month capital lockup is expensive.

spreads on the binary options are just way too large, just waiting for alt-options to open up.  If you watch the order books for the sites, you can actively see the manipulation of the price index at the expiration of the 30 minute windows. Your index calculation is also well off from real time, sometimes many seconds off.  Worst I have seen is over a minute delay between Bitstamp's order book, and the Coinut price index page reflecting this change, sometimes it does not reflect the change at all.  Fraudulent at best.

Not even remotely close to being updated in realtime, bitstamp is usually consistently delayed, sometimes affecting the price index by 20 cents or more

Thanks. I have to play less poker and spend more time exploring OKcoin, Bitmex, and 1broker, lol. If Okcoin is like 796 with more liquidity & tighter spreads, I might have to move.

Both Bitfinex and Bitstamp offer WebSocket APIs that you could use to actually get the realtime index, rather than the polling system you currently use, which is definitely delayed.

Alt-options is not implementing Binary options.

Anyways there's nothing wrong with binary option spread. When you talk about the spread. Marketmakers don't need to keep a tight spread on binary options. If you look at a site like btcoracle there spreads are a lot wider.

Wide spreads signify markets that have low liquidity.  Just because another site has wider spreads doesn't mean wide spreads are okay.  Would be nice to see tighter spreads.  Very little volume for the 30 minute binaries. 

It's extremely hard to market make binary options. That's why there's big spreads. Maybe if it's extremely liquid it might be possible. Anyways I don't find the spread a problem. It's not that hard to make money on them.

Chris, you are absolutely right. It is extremely hard to make the binary options market especially for Bitcoin. That's the only reason for the spread. Market makers also want to gain more volume and make money. They just need to invest a lot of time to polish their pricing models to offer tighter spread.

Andy,

Take a look at short positions in btc at Bitfinex. If you have an account there you can access this statistic real time. I don't have my account open at the moment, but there are typically ~20,000 btc shorted there, most of it on a long-term basis. Fair to assume many of these are miners hedging their future production - large customers who maintain long-term positions. (Do Chinese miners also hedge on some of the Chinese exchanges? I'm not sure ...)

You should be able to offer a better hedging vehicle, i.e. call option alternative that is cheaper (better value) than borrowing btc and shorting at bitfinex. At bitfinex miners must deposit US$ and then pay to borrow btc in order to short. Now on your platform they would need to deposit and hold additional btc, a drawback, but by hedging via short calls, these minors would be saving money I'm thinking. Over time they would benefit from premium decay. Of course the longer-horizon contracts you offer, the better. And because of their volume sales, I would expect they would drive prices down to attractive levels, attracting positional traders like myself. THAT is your golden ticket: customers trading with customers, with market makers relegated to filling in the gaps.

You should run a hypothetical miner's portfolio and compare hedging cost on Coinut vs. Bitfinex. If you can make a compelling case for offering a better hedging vehicle for miner's prospective income streams, and you advertise THAT, you can steal Bitfinex' business here.

Anyway, ideas are a dime-a-dozen I know. Execution is always toughest ... lol.

Regarding spreads it really depends on order flow. There's really a lot of risk with binary option makers because they don't know which direction it's going to go and it's hard when they're trading with people who are really good at predicting direction.

Basically the prices reflect the uncertainty in the market maker, and it's really uncertain.

But, if there's enough orderflow, enough people choosing to go short and long in a short time frame. I would think that the market maker would be able to lower their spreads. They would price it so that they'd want to be closer to a neutral hedge. If everyone is trying to buy long calls, they'd make those more expensive, and they'd make puts cheaper to buy.

You seem pretty good at it. Why not become a market maker of us?

The spread for 30-minute binary options has been reduced significantly. Enjoy trading!

they are currently not pulling from btc-e, even though it is up, that is fraud.  affecting the price index by about 2 dollars

Don't a lot of resources that average Bitcoin exchange rates exclude BTC-E? The site has a pretty poor reputation, and isn't the most reliable site either. Honestly, I don't see the problem.

Yeah, btc-e.com is quite unreliable. Its API service was down during the last few minutes because their DNS service got some problem. We may consider removing btc-e.com in the future.

if you tell your users that you use btc-e when it is up, you must use it when it is up.  and you must not use it when the servers are down.  otherwise you are committing fraud.  it does not matter if their servers are intermittently up and down, you must keep update your index in realtime, which you are not doing. for example, btc-e is down right now, but you are factoring it into your index, which is fraud

Nobody is manually controlling it to make it up or down. It's the program itself that detects BTC-e.com is up or not. There is no manipulation here. You may have bought some puts so you complain here. But what if you have bought some calls? Everyone is experiencing the same problem. But this is  much better than using only one exchange, which then becomes a single point FAILURE.

The ideal solution, and the only real long-term solution, is to use a robust, respected third party index. Yes, you will likely have to pay some licensing fee, but it will raise the legitimacy of your product and help you grow volume. I work with some professional hedge fund managers ... and they wouldn't take this 'exchange' seriously until you've made these types of upgrades. You might look to add someone to your team who has direct experience launching & managing new products on a derivatives exchange. I know Singapore Exchange has been struggling to launch a number of contracts over the years ... some have gained traction while most have floundered. Still, the experience people gain developing and launching those products might be valuable to you.

Ideas are cheap, I know ... lol.

Just removed BTC-e.com. They are ridiculous today.

It doesn't matter if anyone is intentionally manipulating it or not.  If you tell your users you will calculate the index one way, and then you actually calculate it another way, it is fraud, regardless of intent.  I am glad to see btc-e has been removed, as this will help fix the problem, but Indamuck is right.  No serious market maker will come close to this unless there is a verifiable third party index being used.  Because I am calculating the index much closer to real time, using sockets where available and polling every .2 seconds, and your index is usually very delayed.  This kind of misrepresentation of the actual index will prevent any legitimate institutional investing from occurring on your site

Thank you and Indamuck, we will definitely find a way for this problem and make the index unbeatable.

CoinDesk has a pretty nice index, it seems to take into account many of the major exchanges, however it is only calculated every minute, I will post here if I find something better

Vanilla options, I've started playing with them today, and I have this question:

Does the margin formula provide for a maximum maintenance margin of 0.004 btc? Or does the (-out of the money portion) turn positive when the option is in-the-money?

I'm short some out-of-the-money contracts, and wondering how high my maintenance margin could go if the market moves against me.

Currently my margin requirement is about 0.0033 per contract. Can that rise to more than .004 under normal circumstances?

Well there's quite a disparity between buying options and selling options.

When you're buying options you basically get 10x to 40x leverage without risk of margin calls. But you have to pay a premium.

When you're selling options you might be getting 5 to 15% 'interest'. Your profit is capped out. And you can't utilize a ton of leverage. But you get to capture the premium. I think options are low risk for low profit. That's because of the safe margin limits.

So while you might be able to get consistent gains by selling options, there is big potential for gains when you purchase options. And that's why the person selling gets the premium. And that's also why they need to put up more capital.

I'll try to do some math on it.

Personally I've been shorting slightly in the money put contracts. (they're in the money). Maybe that's a bad idea. Also I'm leaving significant headroom which means I'm making less gains on trading capital.

I haven't traded in a while but you seem to have reverted to the scroll bars.

My Bitcoin withdrawals has been processing for two days already, since July 29. Is there an approximate date for when it would be processed and sent?

Verify your details and send them to support@coinut.com


I've been using Coinut for several months, and have never experienced such a delay. Moreover they have been very responsive using the e-mail above. I expect you will have the same experience.

Andy,

For a reference index you might take a look at XBX maintained by Tradeblock: https://tradeblock.com/markets/index

Bitmex just told their customers (in chat) that they are preparing to adopt XBX and will make the switch soon.

It seems cool. I'll check whether this is reliable or not. Thanks.

Sent them an email and they processed my withdrawals. Thanks for pointing that out. :)

XBX seems to have only hourly ticks. It could be useful for settling daily, weekly, and biweekly binary and vanilla option contracts.

I'm not sure if it's well suited for the 30 minute options. And you sort of want a live feed for that to show estimated index.

Actually if you contact them they might have the live XBX feed.

Do you give any leverage for trading ? how many is the maximum ?

Options themselves are already highly leveraged. You probably don't need additional leverage.

I would classify Binary options as quite leveraged. There's a lot of profit potential. While it's also capped at 100% profit that's a lot. And what's great is that unlike future contracts you can't get margin called with binary options.

Secondly there is vanilla options contracts. Vanilla options have leverage built into them when you buy them. They're non linear products which means their is low downside risk but your upside is unlimited. With Vanilla contracts you might be getting 5x-50x leverage. Also make sure you take the premium into account and how much the price needs to move to break even.

coinut OP advertising your platform with bitmedia.io will get you greater results reason being is you would be getting your site/ service in front of thousands of potential clients. please check out the official thread.  Here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085968.0) the thread will answer most questions. but advertising with bitmedia.io you will be able to get the highest traffic quality by choosing your sources.

bitmedia.io is not just a buy ads and forget, you get real results.

Guys, now you can buy PUT options to insure the value of your Bitcoins through our new interface: https://coinut.com/insurance

You don't need to sign up or login. You just need to fill that form.

I started a new thread on trading strategies for prospective Coinut customers that may be new to options. Hope we can generate new interest and continue to grow volumes ...


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1145168.new#new

damn, that thread got deleted.

I spent a ton of time writing a reply and it got deleted and I didn't have a copy saved. And now I'd need to add up all the data again.

I wonder why it got deleted ... there are so few legit posts on this site. This place can be ridiculous sometimes. Well, ok, all the time.

It was deleted because I included a referral link. WTF?!? So much crap on this site, and I can't include a referral link to Coinut, in a thread about option trading strategies. Well, if you are bored and want a good laugh, here's me ripping into the mods:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1146165.0

So there's another futures and options exchange being launched.

quedex.net

They're implementing European options. Currently they only have weekly options (and it's currently fake in contest mode)

And everything is denominated in USDmBTC which is extremely annoying.

Good to see another one coming up. Let's educate Bitcoin users together.

Thank you for mentioning Quedex.

Regarding weekly options, more maturities will appear after the Challenge. Currently, the futures and options expire exactly at the ends of the Challenge rounds, so that the prices cannot be gamed.

We denominate every instrument treating BTC as the home currency and the contracts have foreign currency as an underlying (currently, USD and CNY). We judged that it is the correct approach for the bitcoin-centric derivatives market and that it makes hedging (and calculating hedging cost) easier.
We plan to allow choice in quotes display for those who find this quotation style inconvenient.

Also, we will list futures and options on BTCUSD soon.


wangxinxi,

Indeed, we hope to enlarge the whole options (and other derivatives) market in the bitcoin economy.

Going forward, I'd like to suggest that you start your own thread on bitcointalk.org and present/tout your service there. It is bad form to advertise in a competitor's thread. One post is ok, understandable perhaps, but I hope you get the point ...

Play nice, and professional, and we'll all come check out your service. Meanwhile Coinut is the 'go to' exchange for btc options.

Edit: Ok, I see you do have a thread, nice. I'll check it out. Everyone can go THERE to learn more about and keep up on your exchange.

Unable to login at the moment. Is the site down? Anyone else logged in? I was logged in about 12 hrs ago ...

I do see that 24 hr volume has fallen to about 12k so it looks like the site might be down for everyone?

Thank you for notifying us. It's solved. You can login now. 

I was unable to login this morning (about 7 hours ago) - logged in OK just now, though. The site was a bit odd yesterday - it looked like it was offline, but was still online if you know what I mean.

Sorry, yesterday we did find some bugs in the site but we've fixed them. Now everything is OK.

Guys, we are so excited that we are right now sitting in the office of BoostVC - the best accelerator for Bitcoin startups. Many interesting thing will happen. Stay tuned!

Oh yeah, you should announce you'll have to ban New York customers to get some free PR.

I had a dream ... that you combined with Bitmex and offered your options against their futures/indices. They have a premier futures offering, but not interested in offering options. Bringing all the derivatives under one roof makes sense for the service and the customer base.

VC ... take a big breath Andy. They aim to get you all excited and hyperventilating, before bending you over and presenting their terms. They are salesmen first ...

It's an accelerator not a typical VC. We've checked their terms carefully. Everything seems fine.

Haha, combining with Bitmex's index may be a good idea. But it will definitely take some time :-). BTW, someone will make the market for our longer term vanilla options.

That sounds great. Some people were wondering about the longer time frame vanilla options.

Hey, what are your thoughts about adding a trollbox. Sometimes I see other users also playing the 30 minute binaries. It'd be fun to talk to them. You'd sort of build a bit of community and you can also help people out.

You'd need to have some filters and make sure it's secure. Also there's the UI issue of finding a good place to put it.

I've been putting straddles on with the vanilla options, but your still in the stone age re: margining, and charging me 2x what is necessary. Thus my positions are only 1/2 what they should be. Your commissions are 1/2, and my returns are 1/2 what they should be. Market making is good. Hope you get to sorting out the margining as well.

Thank you for all these suggestions. BTW, the market maker seems to have decreased the spread again. Also there is liquidity for monthly and bi-monthly vanilla options now. We still need a market maker for the half-yearly vanilla options and binary options.

Nice to see extra liquidity

I actually thinks the spreads could be a bit bigger but that could be due to market uncertainty.

It also looks like some of the bots are updating a lot more.

Also I actually never looked at the dates. It's really weird. You didn't line up the longer contracts.

You have vanilla options that expire on both 08/30 and 08/31

Hey did you halt trading or something? Can't open orders

Looks halted. Can't submit orders and quotes look stale.

This is the trial by fire guys ... perfectly foreseeable. Ummmm, how do I log in???

Things looked a little scary a few hours back, when the crash was happening - I wasn't sure if limit orders I'd tried to place were lost or placed. I'm still having problems with the open positions list - when I scroll down it it goes blank and displays the "loading" screen. Sometimes it loads, other times I can "trick" it into loading by slowly scrolling up and down until something "catches" and the next batch of positions loads.

Related to that - could I make a "feature request" for the ability to download open positions? I keep a spreadsheet myself, but being able to easily cross-reference what I think I have against what you know I have - that would be really useful.

That said, I've been really impressed with Coinut to date (and I'm not just saying that because I'm showing a profit!)

Andy here's a glitch, can you take a look?


I'm trying to close some short positions in vanilla call options. The options are deep out-of-the-money so I try to 'close' the position with an order to buy for 0.000002, but I get a message that "Invalid Price: Price cannot be smaller than 0.000001"

I increased my price to 0.000003 and 0.000004 and still get the same error message. I'd like to close these positions so that I can free up my margin.

This should have been fixed. Please check. Thank you for reporting it.

Going on a 48 hour wait for my latest withdrawal...last one took 12+.

Love the ability to play the options market, but non-automated/long wait withdrawals are a huge red flag. I'm done.

Sorry for the delay. Just processed your withdrawals. The reason we process them manually is to make sure we will not be hacked. We may use service like BitGo to automate the process in the future.

I totally respect manual withdrawals for security reasons...but I get really jumpy when I hit withdraw with no acknowledgement for an indeterminate amount of time.

Maybe autosend an email saying "withdraw request received. Withdrawals are processed manually within (defined time frame). Contact support if it has not been received by (defined future time)" or something like that...

Not sure if this is just a coincidence, but it has happened 20+ times to me in only a few days.  The swings I experienced are statistically unlikely compared to the market history.  Almost every time I buy only a few contracts for the 30 min binaries, like 5-15 contracts, I make money.  Once I start putting major money into the contracts, say 100-200 contracts all spread out, the market price seems to swing completely out of the money for me.  Again, may just be coincidence, but the statistical analysis says the 30 min market maker is manipulating the index.  A prior post mentioned that the staff was looking into an alternative, third party price index.  Has any progress been made on this front?

No, no one can manipulate the price. The index is the average of bid and ask prices of Bitfinex and Bitstamp.

As some of you suggested, we need to build a community to make trading easier and more interesting. So we just added a chat box. It's right now minimalism, but will evolve it continuously. If you have any good suggestions, please let us know.

Nice. I remember suggested that.

If it gets busy you might want to appoint some moderators.

Do you want to be one of the moderators?

Guys, the market maker has decreased the spread of the 30-minute binary options very significantly.

Now if you login, the username of the chat box will be changed automatically. Trade and chat. Enjoy!

Guys, the market maker has decreased the spread for 30-minute binary options to a almost negligible number.

Well good luck to him with negligible spreads.

Did he die though? I just logged in and there's no contracts open.

Check again.

spreads getting too large again, and out of the money options are too expensive.  Thursday and Friday were great for trading, today not so much

buy some long term put options

also, site has been down for hours, no response from staff or anything.  Unable to trade and the prices/volumes shown are completely incorrect.  What is going on??? This is pretty unacceptable

if you tell your users that you use btc-e when it is up, you must use it when it is up.  and you must not use it when the servers are down.  otherwise you are committing fraud.  it does not matter if their servers are intermittently up and down, you must keep update your index in realtime, which you are not doing. for example, btc-e is down right now, but you are factoring it into your index, which is fraud

btc-e isn't used anymore.  Also is login broken?

site is most definitely broken atm

What issues are you seeing? I logged in OK several hours ago, and the site seems to be working fine for me. (Mind you, I've only done one trade - the widening gap between Bitstamp and Bitfinex is obviously taxing the market makers).

Is there some problem with the site? I tried to register but I couldn't. The "Register" button only changes into "Registering..." and it's like that for more than 10 minutes.

A previous poster believes so:


I've not had any problems, but I've not tried registering (already registered) and I've not been very active on the site today (one trade only). I flick between binary and vanilla options periodically, and that - at least - seems to work. It's not a very extensive test, though!

I am not able to login in the coinut website.
The site is loading slowly and when i type the username and the password it shows just "LOGIN..."
And it stays just like that, have been tried today almost 10 times but no chance to login.

I've just noticed that the 2015-09-13 16:00 UTC expiry has passed, and yet it still seems to be open. (The reason I  checked it was to see if there was any current activity - I figured if there was it had to have occurred between 12:00 and 16:00 UTC - not to see if expired options could still be traded!) I guess there's something awry - if I were you I'd be glad you hadn't logged in! (And I'm pleased I've not done much trading today - bit worrying, to be honest).

Hi guys, problems have been fixed.

Yeah slightly better to buy in the money options earlier and then buying out of the money options as you get closer. Obviously there's a reason why out of the money gets cheaper and in the money is cheaper earlier.

I'm still getting problems - I saw the same issue yesterday, briefly, but today it seems to be constant. Anyway, issue is: anything I click on starts spawning dialog boxes: "Wt internal error: TypeError: Cannot set property 'className' of null, code: undefined, description: undefined".

Can you try to close your old tab and open a new one?

Hi guys, the strike price shifting problem in the option chain table on the Trade page has been solved.

OK, closed tab and logged in again. There's some improvement - the dialog isn't appearing, but clicking on anything is having no effect (e.g. I start with binary options selected, and the nearest expiry. Clicking on, say, Vanilla Options, has no effect. Likewise, clicking on another expiry time has no effect. I've clicked on "History", and the history tab is highlighted, but the screen remains on the binary options page).

Actually, disregard that first part - I've just had several dialogs again :(

(I don't know if this is useful, but I'm running Chrome (Version 45.0.2454.85 (64-bit)) on OS X (10.10.5)).

There is a chat box on the web page now. You can chat with me there.

Thanks, wangxinxi - I'm there now.

How long does it take a withdrawal to process? I have requested one over an hour ago and still haven't got paid.

Just processed it.

We are on CoinDesk now!!!

http://www.coindesk.com/press-releases/coinut-the-worlds-first-true-bitcoin-options-exchange/

I have checked your site but i found it is now bittask.com . You haven't changed the title till now. Its better you change it. I see lots of work also there i will try to do them. Best of luck with your site.

Hi guys, we just added the 5-minute binary options.

Looks cool,
Are you guys the market makers for the binaries?
Do you publicly publish all expiration prices rates (Vanilla and Binary)?

Yeah you need to publish your 5 minute expirations some where for more transparency and accountability. Quite amazed you added 5 minutes.

Also 20 cents and 10 cents strikes sound like a good system. Yeah some transparency would be good. Bitmex publishes the 5 minute snaps they use from Bitfinex.

Also how is the engine doing? It couldn't really handle volatility before (from the extra trades). And users can't be blamed for trading more.

And I think you might need to do something about self trade statistics. It does make sense that market makers may self trade to get out of risky positions during periods of volatility. But, especially with the 5 minute binary options, it's seriously inflating the daily volume. It's quite the joke. While I know you have a vested interest of having an inflated daily volume, you should also consider having a more accurate daily volume. That way you'd get more trust.

Now we have an even more robust price index.

Nice one! I've seen more changes today, as well. I like the "time to expiry" change to the tabs on the trading page.

One change I'm less keen on is when I download historical positions from the history page - the opening time format has changed from "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" to "Sep 21, 12:00" - the comma makes it really tricky to import the downloaded file to a spreadsheet, and makes it inconsistent with the other date fields in the file.

Good suggestion. We will change the format in the history.

Hi, do you think you should develop procedures when an exchange goes online?

I don't think you should add it right away. This might be too complex for you guys. But I think that when an exchange goes back online from being offline the price will not be accurate for a bit. And it may cause a jump in the index price if its different. Or only add new exchanges 5 seconds after the 5 minute close. That's easier to implement. This will only need to happen if it's been down for more than 5 minutes.

Okay, so that other post was because I thought Bitstamp was down. But actually you don't include Bitstamp in your index calculations because of a high spread. And this makes a lot of sense.

So from this I see that Coinbase would be a good candidate to make the index more robust. Coinbase has low spreads and high liquidity.

Also from playing around on the 10 minute options. I've realized that a spread of 0.06 means that including fees you could do a spread bet of 10% risk to get 200% return. So more of a 5% fee.

Actually redoing the math. Occasionally you lose 0.1 contracts sometimes you win 1 contract. So that's 10%. If you think the range is tight enough you could try doing a spread bet.

Though the spread is usually more than 0.06, including fee it might be 0.15. Obviously the market maker takes into account spread bets, but this is just a low risk strategy for a gambler.

Okay so that's spread bets. Been thinking about them because of all the close calls on 5 minute options. Also over the last 3 days I've paid 0.4 BTC in fees. Seriously needs some incentives for people who do high volume for fee discounts. Bitfinex, Kraken, and okcoin have similar programs.

Coinbase is just added. If you know other liquid market, please let me know.

Actually, I still think it's not betting. If you have the skills, you can estimate the probability and make profit consistently.

Also note the term Kelly betting. A +EV wager is still a bet.

The spread bet is just an interesting wager which is low risk 10% usually depending on the spread. And it's a bet on the strike ending on a zero. It's positive EV if you think the probability that it'll land exactly on a strike is more than 10% of the time.

Note: Self trading has been fixed. You won't see it being reported for volume per contract and daily volume.

Also Coinbase has been added to the index. It seems Coinut also wants to make their index more robust.

Hello, anyone know the difference between POSITION_OPEN and ORDER_OPEN in API call?

I'm implementing order close API call, but, doesn't make sense to close a BUY CALL|PUT, so, when I close a BUY VANILLA PUT I'm exercising it?

ORDER OPEN is for orders. It means that your order is on the market book.

POSITION OPEN is for your positions. It's the contracts that you bought (or sold).

I hope that makes sense.

The benefit of closing a BUY CALL|PUT is that you don't need to pay the fee for closing positions.

The vanilla options are european which means there's no early assignment. When you close a BUY VANILLA PUT it means you're selling the right to exercise the option on the expiry date to someone else.

Okay, spread bets suck.

There's also been complaints by other people about not getting paid put options that hit the strike. And that's because the Coinut index actually has 8 decimals.

So spread options suck and if you're closing a binary option position it would be recommended to close the position instead of buying the corresponding hedge. You have to pay an extra fee by buying the corresponding hedge and the extra fee is probably not worth it for the chance that it'll land on the strike.

Also as a customer I think it would be beneficial to show more decimals on the index.

Is viable the possibility to have vanilla options that expiry every 1 or 2 days?

I ask that, because I'm most interested in day trading, when my strategy goes wrong I need to wait days to neutralize my negative balance.

I'm looking to use binary options for my strategy because they low time-frame, the problem is they are more expansive.

Thanks.

You are right. Now if you want to see price with more decimals, just click the price on the Trade page.

The interesting thing about options is that you can make money when the price isn't volatile unlike futures or margin trading.

and site looks really cool. I will be funding my new account shortly and make some trades.

Thanks. You are welcome to try.

BTW, our liquidity has recovered.

I wish someone would make a youtube video and walk through everything on how to trade on coinut. It's a little confusing for a first time options trader.

I have lots of questions if anyone is bored on a Friday night and wants to answer them :)

1. Why does my floating P/L swing so dramatically?
2. Why is the P/L showing negative, when the price is going down and I placed a PUT order?
3. If Call is for a long position and Put is for a short position why are the sell buttons? Shouldn't they all be buy buttons, or just Call vs Put buttons?
4. Do you have to wait for the expiration time to occur or can close it out early? Is that what the sell buttons are for?
5. If I bought a contract for 0.003 but my P&L is -0.0034  will I lose additional funds on top of the cost I already paid to place the position?

So floating P/L is based on doing a market order. So it takes into account spread. You'd get a negative P/L because if you bought and then market sold you'd lose money.

I'm not sure if you're doing vanilla options. As mentioned you can get negative P/L because of the spread. But for vanilla options you can get negative P/L on PUTs because of time decay. When you buy a PUT there's a premium, the premium decreases as you near settlement. You paid for the premium and now its less which might be more negative P/L. There's a similar thing with binary options. If it moves a lot (high volatility), in the money options will be cheaper. This might be a bit too complex, ask me if you have more questions.

3. For binary options there's a slight difference being a call binary options pays >= strike, and a PUT binary options pays for <= strike. So if it's on the strike then both the CALL and the PUT get paid out. That's why it's slightly different when you sell a PUT and buy a CALL, or sell a CALL and buy a PUT.

3. For vanilla options Selling and buying is really different. When you buy an option (CALL or PUT), your risk is limited. You can only lose as much as the premium you paid for the position. Your upside potential on the other hand is unlimited (sort of). When you buy an option it'll tell you based on the premium where your break even price is. That's why vanilla options are called non-linear products unlike futures. Futures and spot trading your profit/loss is linear. With options it's a bit different since risk is capped. One more thing, this is why buying options is called Longing volatility. You pay the premium, you're betting that the price will out of the range so you make money on the premium, you could also say its like buying insurance, in case the price moves that much.

3. Likewise, when you sell options, you're shorting volatility. You get to collect a premium. But if it's extra volatile, and the price moves enough in the wrong direction, you're going to lose the premium and lose money. If it stays flat or moves in the other direction, you're going to make money. When Selling options your profit is capped to the premium, and your risk is unlimited.

So I hope you can understand how Buying and Selling Vanilla options is quite different.

4. You do not need to wait until expiration. You can do two things, you can make another trade to hedge your position. When you do this you have to pay a fee. The other option is to click the close button. When you close a position like this you don't need to pay a fee again. If your option is well in the money, it may be better to hedge.

Let's say you have a 228 binary CALL option. You want to take profit, you can sell it for 0.009 but instead you could also sell a 230 CALL option also for 0.009. So now you're hedged into settlement. Except there's the case where you make even more money if it settles between 228-230.

5. I'd need more details. When you buy a contract you can't lose more money then you have. But there's also the fee that you paid. Honestly, I don't even look at P/L.

So tell me if you need any more explanations.

To people reading this, you can click the link in my signature to sign up for Coinut.

Thanks for taking the time to reply Chris. Looks like i have some learning to do, this is bit more complex than the leveraged trading I'm used to on finex and kraken.

This is also much more interesting to trade.

Thanks to Chris for the explanations.

Is there a limit to BUY PUT contracts?

I'm trying to buy 100 put (amount), but it list only 50 in "OPEN POSITIONS".

Just iceberg in, you should slowly get filled.

registered on your website, there is some liquidity now. It looks quite cool.

hope you guys are working on a reiteration of the trading page.

Yes, we have improved quite a lot during the last month. We will continue improving the trading page.

Are the 5-min Binaries not available going forward or is their disappearance just temporary?

We are looking for a more robust index. After that they will come back. Stay tuned.

Guys, we just chose TradeBlock's robust XBX index. https://tradeblock.com/markets/index/

The 5-minute binary options are back! Enjoy trading!

Spreads just dropped quite a lot!

Hi guys, feel free to ask me any questions on ZapChain https://www.zapchain.com/a/l/im-founder-of-coinut-a-bitcoin-options-exchange-you-can-use-coinuts-performance-optimized-option/8tqx5JAcar.

I don't want to hijack the thread but I want to gauge any interest in option trading, crypto and regular financial instruments tutoring.  I was a market maker for vanilla options on a few exchanges and have a stint in an attempt at academia afterwards, so, I know a bunch of tricks or should I say stuff they don't really talk about in books for retail investors.  I would charge a small fee.  Like I said, if people express interest I'll put up a thread in one of the sub-forums but don't want to get negative feedback when they say "who the fuck are you."

Hi, sure. We will be glad to talk to you. I just PMed my Skype ID.

I hope you don't leak the users emails again. You know how to send announcements right?

That's a careless mistake. I am sure this will not happen again.

We just built our own robust price index https://coinut.com/index.

Small spreads and the 5-minute binary options are back.

I sent a message to add you skype but I closed it forgot to restart it so you can send me message.

Could you check the logs because I got a message that I logged in when I didn't.  The IP address is different that it normally is. I have 2FA enabled so not sure how they could access the account.  The time of the email was 5:14 PST not sure how that translates into exchange time.

Anyways, I'm around

Thanks,

Navaman

Next time, please send me an email.

We are experiencing a DDoS attack. And we are trying very hard to defeat it.

Finally, the attack stopped. We are now behind CloudFlare.

The market maker has decreased the spread to a negligible number again.

System upgrading completed. It takes a bit longer than expected. But you can now enjoy faster service. Enjoy trading!

Wang,

I'm short some 12 Dec 2015 binary options (316 Puts) - can you list them again?!? I sold them back in July and shortly after you ceased to list the longer-dated contracts.

Given the price move I should have the opportunity to trade this position.

Check my PM.

Wang ... how about listing this again?!? It is in-the-money and there are at least two of us who have an open interest.

Seriously, we know you are just starting up, but derivative markets can't be delisting contracts for which there is open interest. This may be my only opportunity to take a profit and the exchange (Coinut) has its head up its ass ....

That's nice. But could you update the first post? It still says that you use the average from bitfinex and Bitstamp.
That's confusing for the new users like myself, I was puzzled on where did you get the current price from (as it didn't match bitfinex/Bitstamp average) until I've noticed the quoted posts.

Overall, a nice site. Still don't quite get how it all works, but managed to get over x4 on my deposit.

Yup for Dec 12 I'm long 2 contracts for 332 and 1 for 340. I'm willing to settle.

I need some help on site can you give time when you will be online on site chat waiting for your reply thanks

so,thats mean,its more secure than before?

Yes, absolutely. CloudFlare is good at it.

"The CNY exchanges' rates are converted into USD using the average ratio between all the CNY and USD exchanges."

Dr. Wang can you provide practical detail to this statement?

In determining the exchange correlations the specific source/sources to the CNY/USD exchange rate helps me to set strikes during trading.

Thank you.

I have a small amount of btc 0.006 tried withdrawing it but it say insufficient balance even if i lowered the to 0.005 or is it not allowed

You need to play at least 16 times.

Withdrawals have not been processed for days. Multiple users have reported this. What is the hold up?

spoke with Xinxi.  He asked me to post here to inform everyone that the site is down for maintenance.  Not sure when it will be back up, or when withdrawals will be processed, but I assume it would happen after the site is up

The site is up. Continue enjoy trading.

Site up! Trade on. Withdrawal requested Sunday afternoon. Received withdrawal Tuesday morning. TY ;D

I have an open position even though it should have expired by now.

I think if this site owner is serious in growing his business the first thing he has to do it automatic payment system. That is the beauty of bitcoin trading system but still he want to do things manual then he just taking to much stress on him and mostly he will lose more customer. Hope he will think towards improving the service.

Dr. Wang,

I have not identified why/how/when the strike price changes within the strike price dropdown data field and the order popup window. Could be operator error, clicking on the order book...

Because of multiple mis-trades, due to the strike price drop down selection moving, misalignment or changing somehow; I suggest highlighting the strike price in the order confirmation pop up.

Thanks.

Dr. Wang,

The floating close time (anywhere from :04 seconds to :53 seconds) is avoidable.

Code to mark consistently between :00 or :05 and I won't ask why is there is 50 second variance.

Why is there a 50 second variance?

To often the trade swings to the wrong side of strike for me... with no transparency. Varian

Thanks for your reply.

P.S. European options < American options

So... how is the status on my withdrawal I issued over 24 hours ago? With the outstanding payment from the signature campaign you owe me ~0.33 BTC.

Update: Just got a mail from support, withdrawal should be done in "a few hours". Lets see.

Update: Payment received, thanks.

Woah,

European options > American

Hi Andy,
My first post.
Just two days back I have joined Coinut.
My first Question is could you please guide me to a link / resource where I can access a chart bsed on your price index.
I tried to find on your site, but couldn't.

You can check this link here is all tutorial available its very helpful  https://coinut.com/how-to-trade

Well I have already go through the tutorials. Infact made few trades as well. My issue is it is very difficult to guess the short/long term direction of btc in the absence of any charting software based on coinut propritory price index. I have tried charts from other exchanges but the price is way off compared to coinut price index.

Can anyone help please

okcoin.cn normaly leads the moves

I have made a withdrawal request three days back. It still says 'Processing'.
How long does it take?
This is defeating the whole purpose of using bitcoin if the deposits/withdrawals are not instant.

Seems like he's been quite busy the last two weeks with VC's. Anyways I recently requested a withdrawal also. I'll post feedback.

Admin is not responding to any one I also have stuck withdrawal for last 4 days I send 3 emails but never have any reply from them

Xinxi can you allow me withdrawing my money from your website?
This is getting me boring and started hating this exchange.
I have send you many PM and you don't care about your clients that's not good.

I have thought coinut is only having problem with their signature payout, but sad to see they are also not processing withdrawl request. 4 days waiting is so much for bitcoin like payment method. I have withdrawn or better to say lost all of my deposited coin there but now i will not deposit any more after seeing this.

Looks like another bitcoin exchange is about to go kaput and run off on us, guys...

Received the first payment from OP but i get error withdrawing, is anyone having the same issue

the owner wangxinxi have problem with some member about signature campaign. im preety afraid to play in this site ?

Just received a 2 BTC withdrawal.

https://blockchain.info/tx/a86e6b8e7010a645847a355c0b414da9f6cbc710c40d2e73f33d15c70bdaff68

same here its just a small amout of btc 0.017 cannot withdraw  ;D

I'm wondering why the last post is almost 2 weeks old?   Has anyone gotten their money back?  The site is still up , and seems to be functioning.  Does anyone have any update on the owner of the site?

My withdrawal request in pending as "Processing" since last three days.
There are no responses to the emails as well.

Andy, please my BTC ASAP.

the site's collapsing. they still owe me payment from their signature campaign. I would consider any bitcoin in coinut.com as lost.

lets wait a little bit longer OP  said his somewhere around china where network is bad

and i guess his on holiday too

I can`t withdraw anything from their site it always says insufficient balance even if i have enough balance to withdraw, this site ain`t payin so trade it all in a loosing number.

many have experienced the same thing I do not know what happened better if you use the same account data immediately change the paweord
to avoid unwanted

am guessing this is from the bonus if it is you need to make 16 trades before your trade otherwise contact their support team

Is the site dead then or had their coins hacked/stolen?

Consider the site dead. OP is inactive for over a month. All went downhill from when they couldn't get funds to pay for signature campaign (I suspect the OP "borrowed" some from customers' deposits), then there were problems with withdrawals etc.

No, it's not. I am fundraising in China.

We've never used customer's fund to advertise.

As I said, it was only my suspicion.

In such case, care to explain all the withdrawals issues people were reporting on as well as delays/missing payments for sig campaign, resulting in your negative trust score?

There were some delays but no missing payments or withdrawals. I was traveling in China raising money for the company, and the network condition was pretty bad. That's why there were the delays.

Tell that to the people complaining in your sig thread and the person(who IDK why) is on DT 2 and has given you a negative trust

I'm still missing the final payout. you never paid those people...

Pretty interested but seems all went down.

Do you know guys alternative exchange with derivates (options, NOT binary options)

I got my withdrawal processed earlier today, but having good customer support is very important when you are holding on to peoples funds. Any kind of delay will make people think the worst especially in this industry. If you need help with customer support and processing withdrawals you should find someone you trust to handle it while you are away on business. The damage to your reputation can be bad.

It can take years to build your reputation, but only takes a minute to lose it.

seems like site is dead.  almost no volume, and no response to inquiries on the site

Forget about this site. Try to withdraw your funds, if you have any, and move on. OP is inactive for months.

theres even no withdrawal button anymore

yeah this site is gone. kind of expected, hope no one used it seriously

Too bad. Is there any alternative to this site? especially for naked puts and calls.

These guys have a good service, and well designed website, and have always been honest with everyone. Problem is they haven't been able to find anyone able & willing to stand as market maker across many strikes, and/or attract volume. I think it is tough given that there are so many ways to lever one's position in BTC that for most of us options are not essential. They are nice to have, but not absolutely essential.

Anyway, I made some money on this site, and Mr. Wang was always honest me and everyone I knew who traded here, so thought I should speak up.

Finding market makers wasn't necessary. All they need some funds to make markets highly liquid by themselves. After this first step, traders would resonate with the market and market makers. Otherwise waiting market makers to establish liquid markets would be a low probability dream. Always the founder of the exchange should give the first liquidity to the markets.

Well, making markets in btc options isn't as easy as you suggest. Coinut doesn't have the expertise in house: my impression is they are newly graduated IT geeks with minimal trading experience. So they would need to source one or more third party market makers. Apparently they have one, but this MM is of limited commitment/capability.

At the end of the day, owners have been honest, the site is still functioning, and I'm sure they are still casting around looking for some liquidity providers. I know Mr. Wang is native to China so I'm sure he has even been looking for mainland-based market makers. And of course Singapore is a financial center for SE Asia so there are large institutional MMs based there. We may find that BTC runs to above US$1k again, markets get more active, and then an MM or two takes another look at trying to provide better liquidity on Coinut. I haven't given up hope, and still revisit here from time to time ...

Wang, you might have a look at reconfiguring your service as an app on Moneypot. Lots of people here hold balances either on Moneypot or one of its gambling apps. I think Coinut would be an interesting add to their mix given they don't currently have any options offerings. You can find the official Moneypot thread in the Gambling section of Bitcointalk.

If you were a Moneypot app, and simplified your offering to only a dozen, or a few dozen binary strikes, I think you will find many current MP customers stopping in and 'placing a bet' from time to time. Moreover since MP caters to gamblers/gamers they will likely be most interested in the very short-term strikes, i.e. place lots of repeat orders.

Perhaps worth looking into ...

Recently, I found a new options site called EtherOpt. Currently they offer only ETH options. But their markets are highly liquid and very tight spreads.

I think you must show the link

It looks interesting, except that you need a Github account. And some Ether. Coinut won't be interesting because there are no fees to collect. :-O

You only need a GitHub account to chat. But yes, you do need Ether. July contract are highly active right now.

You can easily google it.

https://etheropt.github.io/

Anoyone has experience with https://deribit.com? They also offer vanilla options.. maybe a good possibility to hedge against Coinut.com?

SCAM !!! NOT PAYING FOR MUCH TIME !!!
Also Ignoring user mails

Site has re-launched and the UI is great.  In my experience, it has better prices than BTC-e or bitfinex in uptrending markets, which is great.  I'm also going to be a market maker on this site, and the founder is a lead developer on LTC, so you know its legit.

If you join using this link: https://coinut.com/?r=5mj, you will get .01 LTC free to trade with.  The site currently batches transactions manually to keep network fees down, so you might not see the LTC in your account immediately, but it will arrive in short order.  I have received coins from the site when I try to withdraw, so I can confirm that the site pays.

I looked at deribit, they have a half functional test site,  The test site works o.k. for buying options, buy you cannot sell ( it waits for an actual buyer. )  So hard to see what you might be able to make.

Curious as to why there hasn't been a post in this thread for a while. Now that there are offerings of airdrops, might come alive again.  Meanwhile, I like the simplicity of the exchange platform. Seems reliable.

Dont lie, I registered in June 2017 and did not receive 0.001 LTC as promised

It's a wonderful project. Looking forward to the future! Good luck.

SCAM! There are a lot of complaints that there are no payments for weeks. Moreover, a very complicated verification process - all documents must be strictly in English and must be notarized. Who has all right with this, that too often denied. So the money from this exchange is very difficult to draw. Everything is done in order to attract as many users as possible through the bonus program, but keep the money at home.
By the way mandatory verification was introduced without any warning to users! Be bypassed.