Taking short trades is very risky. A project doesn't go down long without some major bad news. But a little bit of good news can make a project go a long way . So I think long trade is much better than short trade. Short trades can be taken for a very short time.
There are projects that go down for a long without major bad news, like Zcash, Internet Computer (ICP) and other coins. The reason why short trades is very risky is that sometimes exchanges make unexpected huge price pump and dump to liquidate traders and generate profit as a liquidity providers. That happens often on many coins, even on Bitcoin from my experience on Binance.
In futures trading, experienced traders never trade with high leverage, as inexperienced traders use high leverage.
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Futures trading is so advanced that even experienced traders end up making losses here, because this emotion influences everyone to make wrong decisions. So spot trading is a good option for an investor, because even if a coin is dumped by 20% during the bull market, there is a high chance of recovering it in the spot market, and in futures trading, once it is liquidated, all the funds will be zero.
It's true that many traders lose because of high leverage but sometimes there are moments when prices rise significantly for some seconds and then fall down (this rise is different from spot market prices) and this is the moment when many people, even the ones with very low leverage lose their money.
I think that futures trading is only safer when you use 2x leverage and open a short position with 50%, leaving a room for long position to mitigate loses if price doesn't fall.