The coin market has been pretty slow for the past month. Most days, BTC doesn’t even move 1%. With such little movement, there’s just a few opportunities to scalp small profits but absolutely zero room for major trades. In times like this, margin becomes a trader’s best friend.
I’m sure most traders have been using margin for the past month to make ends meet, and most of that volume has been going to BitMEX. Considering the volume of shorts has been on the rise, BitMEX isn’t the best option since BTC is the key currency. On top of that, I’ve become a bit fed up with BitMEX’s need for pre-mature liquidations in order to support its insurance fund. That fund gets bigger. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. BitMEX seems to be less a margin exchange and more like the best insurance operation in history given the rate of growth its insurance fund has seen. But what’s my option? I’m not going to Deribit; there’s no volume.
OKEx isn’t exactly a good option either. They failed to manage their own market risks and had to take huge profits from traders. Since I have been short for a while, I had to fork out some of my profits and that really pissed me off. Plus, just 2 months after that, they pulled off the most disgraceful stunt in the history of crypto exchanges by closing user contracts prematurely without any warning; positions that were in a loss but nowhere close to their liquidation point were suddenly closed, leaving traders at huge losses. So, that just leaves us with BitMEX.
Except, there’s one new margin option and it just started so I can’t be too certain on how good or bad it is.
BitMax (How quaint? It rhymes with BitMEX) just opened its doors a few months ago, and it started off as a spot exchange. However, a day ago, they allowed traders to use margin. The max margin is only 6x and while that’s nowhere near the 100x on MEX, you shouldn’t be using 100x leverage anyways. I don’t care how good your trades have been, literally everyone I know who has used 100x has gotten burned really quick.
Anyways, so far, I really like the trading interface since they converted common spot trading interfaces into a margin one. Most people will have an easy time using it, but there’s another drawback. Since, it only just launched, I can only spot margin pairs for BTC, ETH and XRP. The good thing, though, is that all 3 of these coins are available for margin trading on USDT pairs. Since I am still bearish, this is a good option for me. When my short profits roll in, my gains will be in USDT rather than BTC, which would be worth less than when I had entered the position. Of course, for those of you who are still bullish, there’s BTC margin pairs too.
I really hope the volume picks up. The UI is nice, they have Tether pairs, and the exchange’s track record on their spot exchange is quite good in terms of service. If volume starts improving, BitMax could definitely be a top alternative to MEX.