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Topic: Everything you wanted to know about BTC futures but were afraid to ask! - page 4. (Read 4058 times)

legendary
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A very interesting thread on Twitter, about futures, cash and caddy and contango.

Let's analyise it:

https://twitter.com/caprioleio/status/1377326629077315589?s=20

The attached image is this one:


This is the CFTC COT (Commitment of Traders). We have seen this, it's a recap of the Open Interest broke down in various macro-categories of accounts.

Well, we see that the Asset Managers are roughly flat, while "Others", a residual category, and "non Reported", meaning retail, are net-long long. The only big short category is the Hedge Funds community.

What does it mean?
Let's look at the expiry curve in the BTC futures.



This is Deribit, but every other future exchange has a similar shape.

If you remember well, this shape is called CONTANGO:




An upward shape, with longer expiries with a higher price.


One idea would be of trying to capture this premium by selling the future and buying the underlying position.
If the costs involved in this plays are below the price difference, we actually have a risk free profit.




This is exactly what hedge funds are doing in bigger and bigger sizes. An astute observer might think that those positions are meant to be held until expiry, so the short positions on the future leg, imply a long position must be matched. This is another drain in the bitcoin supply: if those coins are locked in this risk-free trade, they cannot be used to be sold or lent to be sold by those who want to sell the market (hence a quite rise in BTC funding rates)



But this is another story.








legendary
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Bit news for the CME, that is now venturing in the retail market:



CME Group to Launch Micro Bitcoin Futures on May 3
Quote
Tue Mar 30 2021
CHICAGO, March 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CME Group, the world's leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, today announced it will expand its suite of crypto derivatives with the introduction of a new Micro Bitcoin futures contract on May 3, pending regulatory review.
Micro Bitcoin futures will be one-tenth the size of one bitcoin. The smaller-sized contract  will provide market participants – from institutions to sophisticated, active, individual traders – with one more tool to hedge their spot bitcoin price risk or execute bitcoin trading strategies in an efficient, cost-effective way, all while retaining the features and benefits of CME Group's standard Bitcoin futures.


More detail can be found here:
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/micro-bitcoin-futures.html


Quote
Contract Specifications*

CONTRACT SIZE. 0.10 bitcoin
TRADING HOURS   
CME Globex: Sunday - Friday 6:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. ET (5:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. CT) with a 60-minute break each day beginning at 5:00 p.m. ET (4:00 p.m. CT)

CME ClearPort: 6:00 p.m. Sunday to 6:45 p.m. Friday ET (5:00 p.m. - 5:45 p.m. CT) with a 15-minute maintenance window between 6:45 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. ET (5:45 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. CT) Monday - Thursday.

MINIMUM PRICE FLUCTUATION
Outrights: $5 per bitcoin = $0.50 per contract
Spreads: $1 per bitcoin = $0.10 per contract
PRODUCT CODE
MBT
LISTING CYCLE
Six consecutive monthly contracts inclusive of the nearest two December contracts.



So, the notional of this. future will be around 6,000 USD instead of the USD 300,000 of the standard contract.
This will help the retail adoptions of financial futures, supposedly bringing more liquidity.
Of course, it will become easier for hodlers to play the cash&carry game.

Small fishes: rejoice!


newbie
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Blockfi Review 2020: Pros and Cons - how to get bitcoin loan https://cryptocrow.net/bitcoinloans/
legendary
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CME is excellently riding this BTC run.

We can see they consistently are the second biggest exchange under the Open Interest Metric:



Binance is closing the gap, but since last update we see bigger overall values: this is a sign of bigger investor involvement in the market.

Numbers look pretty neat for CME: both volumes and open interest value in USD are going up:



Of course a large effect of these numbers going up are caused by BTCUSD going north in the first place. With higher BTC every dollar based metric is looking good, and can be used to celebrate successes (as Barry Silbert teaches us!)

On CME website we have an indication on Open Interest in BTC units:



Of course this quantity is not directly influenced by USD quotes, so using a spy of mine I was able to gather an historical graph of that:



Here we can appreciate the fact the Open Interest is going up at 11,700 contract, but back in August the absolute number of contract was higher]@15,500 with a similar USD amount.

I think this level is then important and that institutional players could fade the move in BTC in case of further appreciation, as probably this USD level  i relevant.
Keep in mind that the dollar is still the main unit of account for many of those players; MicroStrategy being the only notable exception to this.
legendary
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On the infamous JPM report "Bitcoin’s competition with gold" there was an interesting section about the interpretation of the open interest.

First they analysied the open interested, in a similar way we made mutiple time on this thread.

Quote
Millennials and corporates endorsement of bitcoin have also induced greater interest by institutional investors as evidenced by the spike in activity across  both bitcoin futures and options at CME, and that was before Paypal’s announcement this week (Figure 4). CME bitcoin futures open interest averaged a record of 10.5K contracts per day in Q3, up 32% compared with Q2 and up 127% vs. Q3 2019. Institutional flow in particular saw strong growth, with 692 new accounts added. The number of large open interest holders averaged 79 in Q3, up 64% compared to Q3 2019.





This is pretty" standard" analyisis, and I tried digging a little bit further on the numbers like in the previous post.

Something new surfaced on the following bit.

Quote
What about the positioning backdrop? To infer positioning in bitcoin futures, we use our open interest position proxy methodology that we also apply to other futures contracts, where we look at the cumulative weekly absolute changes in the open interest multiplied by the sign of the futures price change every week. The rationale behind this position proxy is that when there is a price increase, the net long position of spec investors increases also with the magnitude of the increase determined by the absolute change in the open interest. It does not matter whether the open interest rises or falls as the net long position can increase either via fresh longs (increase in open interest) or a reduction of previous shorts (reduction in open interest). And vice versa. When there is a price decrease, the net long position of spec investors decreases also with the magnitude of the decrease determined by the absolute change in the open interest. It does not matter whether the open interest rises or falls as the net long position can decrease either via fresh shorts (increase in open interest) or reduction of previous longs (reduction in open interest).

Our position proxy for the CME futures contacts is shown in Figure 5. This position proxy spiked to a new high for the year as the bitcoin price breached $13k following Paypal’s announcement. In other words, for the near term, bitcoin looks rather overbought and vulnerable to profit taking we think. Figure 5: Our Bitcoin position proxy based on open interest in CME Bitcoin futures contracts




Well, this is an extremely interesting way to approach on the matter, and I will surely try to "replicate" it on my future analysis.

legendary
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In order to complete Yesterday analysis, some movement on the COT published by CME:



We see that the two most directional investor categories have started to diverge retail are at record longs, while HF's are at record short.
So one could start asking: who's right?
Well, the answer could be: both.

On CME website we can analyse some more details:



Here you can see the long and short position of each category. The most relevant is actually the leveraged funds one, with both longs and shorts position, but currently with a net negative exposure.
On the other hand categories like Asset Managers are long only, with no short position whatsoever. Of course they are probably hedging client's positions.
Another very imbalanced category is the "Not Reportable", that is probably identifiable with the retail accounts.


The graph is not exactly readable, but if you go on the website you can open detailed tables like this one:



What I mean is that provably retail accounts, and asset managers, are pure longs, hedging long positions of their clients.
Leveraged funds , on the other hand, are more difficult to read, as their rationale could be not so clear.
A short position could be initiated for a cash and carry strategy (that is a neutral strategy, aimed at capturing a positive future basis), or an arbitrage between exchanges (again a neutral strategy), or a partial coverage of a long underlying positions.
What I mean is that in these COT documents, we are probably looking at a leg only of the total exposure.





legendary
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I must say thing evolved pretty fast.

The  crack down on "unregulated" platform, coupled wit the bull run, who attracted more actors in the Bitcoin environment, presumably "institutional inventors" apparently favourited the CME.

CME has now the second biggest Open Interest amongst Bitcoin exchanges:



The open interest is the measure of the "open positions" on the exchange, and is a more reliable metric when we want to look at "investment" positions, rather than trading positions.

If we look at the trading volumes, actually the situation is quite different:



There we see CME is still lagging behind many exchanges.

Of course, raw trading volumes cannot be considered a good indicator, as they can be faked in many ways, as many studies have demonstrated. Volumes must be coupled with other indicators if we want to assess the liquidity and the reliability of an exchange.


In the following graph we appreciate the fact that, albeit on the rise, trading volumes at CME have been tiny, when compared to OKEx.



Notice of course CME is closed on the weekends, something legacy exchanges must avoid as soon as possible to gain competitivity.

While the trading volumes have been slowly rising, the open interest has been rising steadily in the last month.



if we "zoom" on the CME we can appreciate  the growth of both metrics.




Of course it's like we have a magnifying glass: we know on the trading volumes there is still a lot to be done in my opinion.

Open Interest growth is anyway impressive in my opinion, and above all quite "unexpected". But exchange are looking for volumes to gain marketing exposure and headlines, but they look at open interest to gain a steady inflows and loyal customers, meaning revenues on the long run.
Institutional money look at depth in markets, and reliability, they might not be interested in trading volumes, if the exchange cannot provide them with a fully qualified legal framework, insurance coverage included. On these aspects CME can play at par with the other exchanges.
OF course the liquidity can be improved, and of course the anachronistic stop during the weekends must be somehow eliminated for CME to fully compete in this arena.
 
legendary
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Time to celebrate at CME.
They sent out some interesting graphs to their newsletter readers, celebrating the success of their products:




Quote
Bitcoin futures (BTC) open interest (OI) averaged a record of over 10.5K contracts per day in Q3, up 32% compared with Q2 and up 127% vs. Q3 2019. Institutional flow also saw notable growth, with 692 new accounts added, and the number of large open interest holders (LOIH) averaged 79 in Q3, up 64% compared to Q3 2019.

Q3 Bitcoin futures highlights*
  • Average daily volume (ADV) reached 8,960 contracts (44,800 equivalent bitcoin or ~$490M notional value).
  • Record OI of 15,406 contracts (77,030 equivalent bitcoin) on August 17.
  • 40%+ of BTC volume was traded outside the US, with ~15% coming from APAC and ~25% from EMEA.
  • 5,600+ unique, active accounts have traded since launch.






Slightly off topic here, but also Options saw an solid growth in Q3, after being launched in Q12020:




Of course, those numbers must be taken with a pinch of salt.
Zooming out to the industry, we see CME is certainly picking up, but is still lagging massively behind other exchanges:



Of course we are comparing apple with pears here, as there is a massive distinction from "fully compliant" exchanges, and the "rogue exchanges" in less legally demanding jurisdictions.
As we have seen anyway, regulators are becoming tougher on less regulated exchanges, so I guess players who are more compliant with current financial regulations have a massive upside potential, to gather institutional money.


legendary
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Basically, the top guys at BitMex got arrested.

This is not an accurate statement, fillippone.

One of the top 4 guys was arrested and three others were charged. 

"Arrested" would more accurately describe some how being physically restrained (even if later released) - and physical restraint only happened to one of them so far, as far as any of us knows as I type this post.  Unless you have news that is not otherwise currently known by yours truly?
You are absolutely correct.
 I changed the wording a couple of times and "one of the" got stuck in the keyboard in the final edit, changing the meaning of the sentence.
Thanks for pointing out. I also edited to make it more clear why everyone panicked for this.
legendary
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Self-Custody is a right. Say no to"Non-custodial"
Basically, the top guys at BitMex got arrested.

This is not an accurate statement, fillippone.

One of the top 4 guys was arrested and three others were charged. 

"Arrested" would more accurately describe some how being physically restrained (even if later released) - and physical restraint only happened to one of them so far, as far as any of us knows as I type this post.  Unless you have news that is not otherwise currently known by yours truly?
legendary
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Big news in the future market:

Quote
CFTC Charges BitMEX Owners with Illegally Operating a Cryptocurrency Derivatives Trading Platform and Anti-Money Laundering Violation


Source: https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8270-20

Basically, one of the top guys at BitMex, namely the CTO, got arrested.
Apparently their funds were holded on a 3 of 4 multisig address containing 193,000 BTC.
For sure the CTO was one of the 4 signer of those addresses.


Quote
Bitmex has ~$2b worth of Bitcoin in their vaults (around 193k BTC) Flushed face



https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1311706827982360576?s=20


Futures Markets were quick to react on the news, and traders literally scrambled to colse their positions on Bitmex: open interest dropped more than 14,000 BTC in a few hours, and slowly continuing to decline to a total of 34,000 BTC widthawn so far, according to Coindesk





The reaction was particularly heavy on futures positions. Traders were quick to close their positions on BitMex fearing to have their funds locked on the exchange. This thing is really scary for a future traders willing to do an "arbitrage" activity between exchanges, where the speed of transfer of funds between exchanges is vital.

Trying to calm the markets they started manually processing the withdraw requests ahead of time. This was crucial in restoring, as it were possible, a little bit of faith in the exchange.

The situation is well wrapped up by this piece by BTC Times
BitMEX Owners Charged With Illegally Operating a Crypto Derivatives Trading Platform

What it interest me the most is the reaction on the futures market:

1. Bid/Offer Spread:

The following is the daily average Bid/offer Spread for 10 Millions on Bitmex



As you can see no major reaction from the cristi, spreads remained tight, a little bit of widening due to diminished liquidity, but nothing extraordinary. This is a very positive sign, after all.

ùThe following is another representation of the above. You can only barely notice something happened on Oct 1st:




2. Basis Spread vs. Future.
Of course basis collapsed, nobody wanted to hold bitcoin on the long end on Bitmex, this raised the cost of carry, thus reducing the basis.



This is a very exchange-specific fact, as we see the basis didn't change on Binance, or any other exchange

3. Funding

As there was a rush to close the futures, to withdraw liquidity, there was a slight imbalance also in positions, this reflected in a few blips in the funding (from positive, to negative, then positive again, then more negative)



But as traders were draining liquidity from both sides of the trade overall, funding was little affected.



Conclusion: Bitmex had a severe hit in reputation, which is an utterly important factor considering an exchange.
From a technical point of view, markets have been smoothly functioning throughout the event, the exchange was even ready to amend their strict procedures (manual signing of transfer) in order to reassure the market participants about their solvency. This is equally important.
legendary
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Time to analyse a mechanism used typically by Bitcoin Futures: the funding mechanism. The idea of this post came to me reading a post from Joe, an infamous whale in the bitcoin market:

Quote
The easiest arb play the last few days: sell 1 BTCUSD perp on FTX/Deribit/Kraken/Binance, buy 1 BTCUSDt perp on Bitfinex, pocket .05-.06% in funding every 8 hours. With yields like this, who the hell needs DeFi?

Why aren't more people doing this, I wonder?

https://twitter.com/J0E007/status/1288567031399428097?s=20

This definitely caught my attention, as I wanted to explain futures funding in detail in my thread, but I hadn't done so far.
I am trying to explain in this post what is future funding, and what is the arbitrage Joe is referring to.


I am going to describe funding mechanism using the exchange examples. There is a very little variation from the various exchanges. I will quote the relevant part, with minimal edit from me, as those explications can be found almost with the same wording on every exchange providing perpetual futures. So I don't wan to to be accused of plagiarism for something that is already been cloned over and over the internet.



A perpetual future is a type of Futures Contract that doesn’t have an expiration date or settlement. These are quite uncommon in traditional markets, and, as long as I know, are used only in bitcoin trading. A Perpetual Contract is similar to a traditional futures contract in terms of trading, yet as it will not expire so that you can hold a position for as long as you wish. Given the fact it cannot hold close to the underlying price with the classical “no arbitrage-condition on expiry dates”, Perpetual Contracts track the underlying Index Price via the funding system.

Quote
Funding is the periodic interest payments between traders which aim to keep the Last Traded Price as close to the Index Price as possible. If the rate is positive, then Longs will pay and Shorts will receive the rate, and in the opposite way if the rate is negative. On many exchange funding occurs multiple times a day, the most common case is thrice a day, every 8 hours. At these times the exchange regulates the funding between every open contract at those times.

Please note that this is a transaction directly between the two sides on the open interest, there is no commission from the exchange, as the ultimate reason for this is to avoid the opening of arbitrage windows between the perpetual futures and the underlying index. If a trader closes his position before the snapshot no payment is expected against the exchange.

In the following example, I will try to explain the calculation of the funding. The computation is really similar for many of the exchanges, bar some negligible details.

What is Funding?
Quote
The Funding Rate is comprised of two main parts: the Interest Rate and the Premium/Discount. This rate aims to keep the Last Traded Price of the Perpetual Contract in line with the underlying market price of Bitcoin.
This way, the contract mimics the margin trade market, as buyers and sellers exchange interest payments periodically.

Every Perpetual Contract consists of Base currency (BTC) and Quote currency (USD).

The Interest Rate is calculated as:
Code:
Interest Rate (I) = (Interest Quote Index - Interest Base Index) / Funding Interval
where
Code:
Interest Base Index = The Interest Rate for borrowing the Base currency;
Interest Quote Index = The Interest Rate for borrowing the Quote currency;
Funding Interval = 3 (Funding occurs every 8 hours).

Perpetual Contract may trade on the exchange at a significant premium or discount to the Mark Price. In both cases, a Premium Index will be used to raise or lower the next Funding Rate to levels consistent with where the contract is trading.
Each contract’s Premium Index is calculated as following:
Code:
Premium Index (P) = (Max (0, Impact Bid Price - Mark Price) - Max (0, Mark Price - Impact Ask Price)) / Index Price + Fair Basis used in Mark Price

where

Code:
Impact Bid Price = The average fill price to execute the Impact Margin Notional on the Bid side
Impact Ask Price = The average fill price to execute the Impact Margin Notional on the Ask side

Funding Basis = Funding Rate * (Time Until Funding / Funding Interval)
Fair Price    = Index Price * (1 + Funding Basis)

Impact price, bid or offer is the average price at which a certain amount of BTC can be executed. This is done to take into account the depth of the market, rather than the nominal bid-offer price, that can be irrelevant in thin markets. Usually, for the perpetual futures, the impact price is calculated on a size of 10 BTC.

Fair basis is instead used to "drag" the future price toward the Fair price at around the timing of Funding Timestamp. Funding Basis is computed every Minute.

Quote
The funding you pay or receive is calculated as below:
Code:
Funding = Position Value * Funding Rate
When the Funding Rate is positive, longs pay shorts, the opposite when the rate is negative where the shorts pay the longs.

Bear in mind that Position Value is not impacted by the future leverage. For example, if you hold 10 BTCUSD contracts with 100x leverage funding is charged/received on the notional value of those contracts (10 BTC) , and is not computed on how much margin you have assigned to the position (that is determined computing the total exposure of 10000.

Funding Rate Calculations
Quote

The Funding Rate is composed of two parts: the Interest Rate and the Premium/Discount.
The Funding Rate aims to keep the traded price of your Perpetual Contract in line with the underlying reference price. Therefore, the contract mimics how margin-trading markets work, as the longs and shorts of the contract exchange interest payments periodically.

Interest Rate

Every perpetual future contract consists of two parts: a Base currency and a Quote currency. If we analyse the BTCUSD Perpetual Contract, the Base currency is Bitcoin, while the Quote currency is USD. The Interest Rate is a function of interest rates between the two currencies.
Code:
Interest Rate (I) = (Interest Quote Index - Interest Base Index) / Funding Interval
where
Code:
Interest Base Index = The Interest Rate for borrowing the Base currency
Interest Quote Index = The Interest Rate for borrowing the Quote currency
Funding Interval = 24/8 = 3 (The funding occurs every 8 hours over a 24 hours cycle)

Premium / Discount Component
The perpetual contract is a totally separated market from the underlying. Also, as it never expires, there is no arbitrage condition pulling the price to the underlying market. To avoid the dislocation of the future, something that could hinder his effectiveness as an hedging and speculative tool, a mechanism is put in effect to induce market participants to rationally adjust the price toward the expected value: this mechanism is the funding system.

Quote
If the perpetual future trades at a Mark Price that is away from the Index Price, the price of the underlying, a Premium Index will be used to raise or lower the next Funding Rate to levels consistent with which the contract is being traded.
Premium Index (P) = (Max(0, Impact Bid Price - Mark Price) - Max(0, Mark Price - Impact Ask Price)) / Spot Price + Fair Basis used in Mark Price
Please check Fair Price Marking for more information on the Impact Bid Price and the Impact Ask Price.
 
FAIR PRICE MARKING
 
Final Funding Rate Calculation
The exchange calculates the Premium Index (P) and Interest Rate (I) every minute and then performs an 8-hour Time-Weighted-Average-Price (TWAP) over the series of minute rates.
The funding rate is calculated with the 8-Hour Interest Rate Component and the 8-Hour Premium / Discount Component. A +/- 0.05% dampener is added.
Code:
Funding Rate (F) = Premium Index (P) + clamp(Interest Rate (I) - Premium Index (P), 0.05%, -0.05%)

The 'clamp' function limits a value between an upper and lower bound, where the preferred value is the first parameter, the upper bound is the second parameter, and the lower bound is the third parameter. In other words, the function 'clamp' selects the middle value among the three. Therefore, if (I - P) is within +/- 0.05%, then we take (I - P) and F = P + (I - P). This means the Funding Rate is equal to the Interest Rate.
This calculated Funding Rate is then applied to the BTC Position Value of each trader to determine the Funding Amount to be paid or received at the Funding Timestamp.
Funding Rate Caps
The exchanges usually set maximum levels, caps, on the Funding Rate to ensure that the maximum leverage can still be used.
Usually there are two separate caps levels:
The absolute Funding Rate is capped at 75% of the Initial Margin - Maintenance Margin. If the Initial Margin is 1% and the Maintenance Margin is 0.5%, then the maximum Funding Rate will be 75% * (1% - 0.5%) = 0.375%.
The Funding Rate shall not be changed by more than 75% of the Maintenance Margin between Funding intervals.

Funding Fees
The exchanges don’t charge any fees on funding. The funding is exchanged directly between the long and short position holders. This gives the maximum liquidity to the funding system, avoiding arbitrage possibility and ensuring the most accurate pricing of the future itself, which is ultimately in exchange interest.


To help you familiarise with all the above computation I readied up a



Back to Joe's tweet.

I don't know it it looks so great after all.

According do his calculations, with a 10 BTC position spreading FTX vs Bitfinex (20 BT locked) you could potentially yield a little bit less than 0.015 BTC per day.
In my humble opinion he misread a rate and my computation lead me to an even lower outcome of 0.004 BTC per day when computing the correct rates.





legendary
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Looks like we have a massive bitcoin options (10,000 BTC) will expire at the end of the month. Most of them on September 25. So it will be interesting as what it can bring to the ecosystem, specially in the 25th.



Bitcoin options open interest is back to the $2 billion ++ mark again this September.



https://analytics.skew.com/dashboard/bitcoin-options


I would like to keep this thread on topic, discussing futures only.
You are more than welcome to discuss option subjects in the options thread.
Everything you wanted to know about BTC options but were afraid to ask!
hero member
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Looks like we have a massive bitcoin options (10,000 BTC) will expire at the end of the month. Most of them on September 25. So it will be interesting as what it can bring to the ecosystem, specially in the 25th.



Bitcoin options open interest is back to the $2 billion ++ mark again this September.



https://analytics.skew.com/dashboard/bitcoin-options
legendary
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Bakkt Futures hitting a new record.

Quote
Tuesday's numbers:

Chart with upwards trend Volume: 17745 ($192.84 million, +61%)  (New ATH Rocket)
Rocket All time high: 17745 (9/15/2020)
Money bag Open interest: $12.60 million (+13%)


https://twitter.com/BakktBot/status/1306115788995260424?s=20

Numbers looks pretty solid per BAKKT standards: Undolfed graph seems to confirm:


The problem is when you put those numbers in perspective: leaving alone every major exchange and concetnrating on CME only the situation is not looking good either:
VOlumes: BAKKT Volume are on the rise, but a tiny fraction of CME
legendary
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And it seems that it has a negative effect on the price of BTC as the schedule options are going to expire today (close to 58 BTC). And yeah, it's really interesting to see Deribit really doing good.


Latest data from Skew

Interesting, even if I tend not to give too much credit to expiry manipulation, rather than I credit Powell for this volatility.
Also Deribit had some system failure, that hindered trading.
Anyway please comment on options on the other thread: Everything you wanted to know about BTC options but were afraid to ask!
Those two threads already are very similar (some users didn't even realised they were two different ones) I would like to avoid confusion.
legendary
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And it seems that it has a negative effect on the price of BTC as the schedule options are going to expire today (close to 58 BTC). And yeah, it's really interesting to see Deribit really doing good.


Latest data from Skew
legendary
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Finally BTC market moved a little bit.
I read enthusiasm here and there for "volumes picking up" and "institutional money flooding the markets", so I just wanted to shed some light on this.

A little foreword to restate my thought about derivatives.
Of course I think derivatives are a good thing for bitcoin, as more liquid markets are a good tool for investors to do a more effective price discovery of bitcoin.
OF course in the short period this can introduce some volatility (insert here "derivatives manipulation" or "gamma trading induced market crash" conspiracy theories"), but I think those markets are beneficial to bitcoin in the long run.
As I am here for the long run, and not daily trading, I think whatever can help discovering the true value of bitcoin, is welcome into the arena.



Cryptocompare July Exchange review gives us a few good information on how exchange volumes moved these last month, I will try to update them a little bit using skew.com and other data.

June and July volumes exibhit a positive momentum, but we are still far from the top volumes reached during May.



One thing to notice is the constant increase of the derivatives volume compared to the total, now at 41% and consistently up since months.
BEar in mind that here "derivatives" refers to the combined value of bitcoin futures and options added up.

Looking specifically at Derivatives exchange we see the "unregulated exchanges" still play the biggest part, getting most of the volume share. CME and BAKKT are having good results lately, but still they are tiny compared to biggest players:

If you squint your eyes you can see CME, Bakkt is subpixel dimension.
legendary
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This is something I wanted to talk about since a long time:

Stablecoin Demand May Drop if Traders Abandon Bitcoin ‘Cash and Carry’ Strategy

Quote
Institutional demand for stablecoins may cool because yield on “carry trades” has been cut in half since Monday.

The annualized rolling one-month futures basis shot as high as 28% at the start of the week on the Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange OKEx, the biggest in terms of open interest. That was the highest premium since February, according to data provided by the crypto derivatives research firm Skew.

That premium, however, dropped to 14% in under 48 hours. In other words, the carry strategy, if initiated now and held until next Friday, will yield an annualized return of 14%, down from 28% on Monday.

Carry trading, or cash and carry arbitrage, is a market-neutral strategy, one that seeks to profit from both increasing and decreasing prices in one or more markets. It involves buying the asset in the spot market and simultaneously selling a futures contract against it when the futures contract is trading at a premium to the spot price.


Cash and Carry is a market neutral strategy used on every financial future markets,, when the future misalign with the forward price. This difference "the base", can be "cashed and carried out" by any arbitrageur".
This kind of activity is the precise reason why usually the two markets are very much aligned.
Of course as the expiry of the future nears,  the difference between the future price and the spot price deceases, so mispricing are very difficult to experience, and even more difficult to exploit (think about the WTI future going negative a couple of days before the expiry, this gigantic misalignment was created right because there was an extreme difficulty in catching the falling knife.
legendary
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Self-Custody is a right. Say no to"Non-custodial"
This post is the equivalent of this another one regarding options.

I did not realize that you had started two topics that seem to be the same topic, in the same section and in the same language.  Is there some kind of mistake?  Shouldn't one of the threads be locked...? ... sure there could be some kind of a reference in a continuing thread to a locked thread.  Is there a difference between the two threads or some kind of reason that two threads serves some meaningful purpose?

Sorry but I disagree.
Those two topics are different.
This one is aimed at explaining and discussing bitcoin futures.
The other one is aimed at explaining bitcoin options.

Those two instruments are quite complicated financial derivative of bitcoin: future is a linear derivative, meaning its price change with a fixed ratio with the one of bitcoin, while options are non linear derivatives, meaning the price of the option changes in a non linear way with the price of bitcoin.

As this difference involve quite a different approach to pricing and use of those instrument, I decided to open two different thread.
Also this is meant to discuss specific option market taxonomy (volatility, smiles, Greeks) that are irrelevant for futures.

Last bit not least I think having two different thread allows more specific questions about the instrument asked from the forum. As always those threads are meant to learn something.

Hope this clarify and more precisely define my choices.

Fair enough...

I misread futures/options, and then prior to today, I had not subscribed to that options thread... so yeah, I agree that they are different topics and they serve a purpose, like you just reiterated..
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