How can you "neutralize" your bitmex-wallet when youre out of the market.

[PBJMan]

Hello All.
Im new here.
After ten years of inactivity I'd like to join again the "wall-street"-game

I was practicing with the bitcoin-prices on bitmex a few weeks, and today I wanted to create and fund an account.

But then I realized:
Because you have to fund in Bitcoins ( instead of Dollars, Euros etc), then as long as you have funds in your account and you are not totally invested in some position,
then you "always hold a long position" on Bitcoins.
So if I am out and I do nothing, and the volatile crypto-currency-price drops for 10% in 2 days, then I also loose 10% "value", although I wasnt even invested. Of course it works in both directions, but this is a high-risk approach then I think.

How do you guys remedy that problem ?

Do you go short on half of your capital when youre out of the market ?

Am I thinking wrong here ?

I am thinking about turning to forex if I cannot find a reasonable solution for this.

I am grateful for any thoughs / ideas / help.

Dave

[BitMaxz]

How do you guys remedy that problem ?

So your problem is they don't support FIAT to fund your account on Bitmex and you don't want to lose by holding Bitcoins?

I don't trade on Bitmex so I don't know how their market works. I usually trade on Binance but the solution for your problem is to use any stable coin available on Bitmex like USDT.
According to this https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/bitmex they also support direct trade to USD I don't know if they do but you can see on that link that they have USD pairs.

Do you go short on half of your capital when youre out of the market ?

I think Bitmex also has a feature called stop-loss limit if you want to go out on the market when a bear market you can use stop-loss limit before the price drop a lot.

Am I thinking wrong here ?

You might be a newbie on trading?

I think you will need this link below you will find almost all trading tools there including trading guides.

- https://github.com/SpiralDevelopment/Awesome-Crypto-Trading

[PBJMan]

Hello. Thank you for your detailed reply.

You're right - my problem is at Bitmex they don't support FIAT to fund my account.
So then I had a look at Binance, and to me it seemed to work similar, doesn't it ?
Do you have to keep Crypto-Coins all the time on Binance when youre out of the market , or can you keep FIAT and then only buy Crypto during trading ?
I think Binance would be fine for me then, I just want to secure my funds with something pretty stable whenever they are not currently invested.

Thanks for the link.
I'm a newbie to cryptotrading, but not to trading in general. Spent quite some time and studied alot of technical stuff years ago and then stopped worrying and turned away from trading.
But I am by no means a pro or an expert.

I'm not quite sure if I understand your stop-loss suggestion.
I know Bitmex offers any type of Order I could need.
 I just meant that if you don't want to be invested, but you don'T want to withdraw and you want to keep your funds in your wallet and stay neutral, you then could take half of your funds and go short on bitcoins, that way the short position woul pretty much neutralize the other half of the funds in your wallet which are effectively a long position on bitcoins.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

Binance is pretty jumbled up with lots of markets that can easily confuse a new user but what you are looking for are probably Linear perpetual contracts (These are perpetual contracts where you will be using USDT, which is a stable coin representing USD to trade in your derivatives exchange like BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT etc) and not inverse perpetuals like BTC/USD, ETH/USD, XRP/USD which will be using the respective crypto coin as the base currency.

So that way, the volatility of the crypto market won't affect your account balance even when you don't have any open position.

I am not advertising any exchange but try checking out bybit as they seem slightly similar to Bitmex in most things from fees structure to the set up of the account. I have used them for about 2 years now. No problem so far.

[PBJMan]

Wow. Thank you for all the info. It helps a lot.

For the start now I have settled for an account at XTB.
The platform seems fine for me, the conditions clear and it has both FOREX and the main crypto-currencies, which is just fine for me. Cryptocurrency-wise I'm anyways interested only in Bitcoin or Ethereum for trading . The prices of Bitcoin there behave very closely to what happens on Bitmex with XBTUSD.

Thank you so much. 
Best Regards,
Dave

[Tytanowy Janusz]

Do you go short on half of your capital when youre out of the market ?

Am I thinking wrong here ?

You are correct. The only problem is that if you short you are not exposed to currency risk (BTC price change) but you are exposed to flash crashes that happens from time to time. Especially when you use part of your portfolio with higher leverage to hedge your initial exposure.

Best would be to use Binance. Super low fees, high liquidity, support many currencies. I'm not sure about XTB but as far as I know you don't trade directly there. They take your order and pass it further taking extra fee. So you will pay much more for trading. In case you actually trade there - there is little to 0 volume compared to binance means that you will have higher spreads and unexpected price crashes that will trigger stop-loses that would not be triggered on higher liquidity market.

[PBJMan]

Yes. I noticed pretty fast that the spreads on XTB for trading crypto are pretty high. so now I settle for 2 accounts - one for crypto on Binance and one for other stuff on XTB. Binance has very low fees indeed. Thank you for pointing out the Flash-Crashes. That is a risk I didnt even think about yet.

[Sterbens]

The platform seems fine for me, the conditions clear and it has both FOREX and the main crypto-currencies, which is just fine for me. Cryptocurrency-wise I'm anyways interested only in Bitcoin or Ethereum for trading . The prices of Bitcoin there behave very closely to what happens on Bitmex with XBTUSD.

You have complete control over the trades you manage, so it depends on how comfortable you are with trading crypto on any exchange, even if you are more interested in choosing to trade a larger percentage on FOREX than on Binance. it goes back to how much you feel profit from your trading results over the next few months.

[el kaka22]

That is literally what we do? I mean you could always have a stop loss so that you do not lose too much when you are out or when you are sleeping, that is what a stop loss does. You put in an order like "sell if it drops 5%" or whatever and when that happens you end up selling and getting out without you personally not doing anything, you could be asleep and it will still follow your order when it falls that big and you will be lucky if it drops much bigger, like when the price dropped 50% a month or so ago, if you had 5% stop loss you gained a lot of value.

That is probably the only thing you can do, aside from that yeah we just hold and do nothing and sometimes it falls, but mainly it goes up, the price is literally 30k+ right now and that is a record, 1.5 more than the last ATH and that is why many of us like the long term investment even though there are short term falls.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

Best would be to use Binance. Super low fees,

This is not entirely accurate though. It depends on the type of order one makes in an exchange. If one is a market maker, Binance charge an average of 0.02%
Exchange like Bitmex, phemex and Bybit, Kraken instead charge (-0.025%) meaning they actually pay the market markers something. In this instance Binance fees would be expensive

If one is a taker, Binance charge an average of 0.04%, while the exchanges i have listed charge around 0.075% which would make Binance slightly cheaper.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

This is not entirely accurate though. It depends on the type of order one makes in an exchange. If one is a market maker, Binance charge an average of 0.02%
Exchange like Bitmex, phemex and Bybit, Kraken instead charge (-0.025%) meaning they actually pay the market markers something. In this instance Binance fees would be expensive
If one is a taker, Binance charge an average of 0.04%, while the exchanges i have listed charge around 0.075% which would make Binance slightly cheaper.

With order book that changes so fast it is hard to always be a maker. Sometimes you will be a maker, sometimes taker. Especially that every triggered stop-loss order will for sure be a taker order. So if you are 50% taker 50% maker you pay 0.025% on average vs 0.03% on biannce. But binance has fee reduction for BNB hodlers and vip program which may push this on favour of binance. But transaction fee is not the only cost of trading. There is also slippage, market inefficiency (flash crashes and spot/futures price spread that effect in bigger funding). Also latency is important.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

With order book that changes so fast it is hard to always be a maker. Sometimes you will be a maker, sometimes taker.

Not if you make a Post only limit order. If there's any sudden change in the price, your order won't be executed as a taker. If that option is disabled. you will end up being a taker at times.

Especially that every triggered stop-loss order will for sure be a taker order.

Stop loss orders end up as taker order.
Stop limit orders end up as marker order. I have used stop limit order sometimes. I don't know if this option is available in Binance futures.

So if you are 50% taker 50% maker you pay 0.025% on average vs 0.03% on biannce. But binance has fee reduction for BNB hodlers and vip program which may push this on favour of binance.

Don't even talk about the Binance VIP program. It useless and only favors whales

Here are the lowest tiers for futures traders

[Tytanowy Janusz]

Stop limit orders end up as marker order. I have used stop limit order sometimes. I don't know if this option is available in Binance futures.

Depends how you set your stop and limit price. In most cases when your stop-loss/stop-limit is triggered you want to get out of position as fast as possible. There is no stop-loss option on binance because you can set stop-limit in a way it works like stop-loss (limit price set close to 0). So there is no need to have both.

Don't even talk about the Binance VIP program. It useless and only favors whales

Not only whales but also small scalpers, middle size daytraders, small marketmakers, small algo arbitrage traders, small algo triangular arbitrage traders.