Well, as I said it's best to have fiat (shitcoin) for this one. Which is why I won't do it. But, basically you buy however many BTC on the spot for current price of 55000. At the exact same time you sell a future, perhaps Sep 26th for this example, for the same number of BTC at a current price of 62700. profit equals 7,700 minus fees per coin
This can be done using CBOE and CME as well as many others, perhaps less reputable exchanges.
The risk for this trade is couter-party only and of course opportunity cost (there is no possiblity of capital gains or losses). Not your keys not your coins. Thing is it's all about levels of risk and what you are comfortable with in the end as well as your goals. Just remember nothing is risk free. Even holding your own keys is not risk free, there are roughly 4million inaccessible coins to prove that.
*Above prices are taken from Deribit.
How does this work exactly? I would love a bit more ELI5.
I posted a link earlier, here it is again.
https://blog.bitmex.com/how-to-arbitrage-bitcoin-futures-vs-spot/The WO sometimes must be combed thoroughly, but it usually does deliver good info - be it bitcoin or digital cameras.
Or you're just halftrolling and... username checks out?
I don't believe CBOE offers BTC futures anymore. And i don't see Sept futures on CME. They're not trading now but i believe June futures were trading at around 7% premium. What you're forgetting is that CME is cash settled so they won't take your BTC as collateral for margin. Thus you'd actually need to lock up 150%, 100% to hedge with real BTC and then 50% to post for margin. At 150% that would bring actual premium down from 7% to 4,7%
As far as risks, you're forgetting that if BTC goes up before your settlement date you're gonna get margin called and will need to come up with more cash, or get automatically closed on a spike.
Also transfer times might be an issue, you'd need to sell your BTC and transfer funds to yourself and then to your broker at settlement.
Sure there are some premiums to be had if you want to tolerate the risk, just don't try to claim "140% returns with 0 risk"
I didn't know about CBOE discontinuing BTC futures, or about CME futures being cash settled.
Transfer timing, 3rd party risk and other factors do exist. No trade is a free lunch: even arbitrages can go awry. However, the so-called inverse futures have a mathematical structure such that short positions with leverage < 1 can never get liquidated. Just sayin'.
EDIT in ELI5 form for OP - I have to add, though, that
this arbitrage works either way - number go up or number go down -
only because the profits are measured in fiat. When measured in bitcoin, there are profits only if number go down. So for a real hodler it's not really an arbitrage, but rather either (a) a sale (at over market price, though!), or (b) a btc gain. What it turns out to be depends if number go up/down.
In other words: if number go up, you end up with a higher dollar value, but your btc value has gone down (you still give up less btc than if you had sold, because the resulting effective price is over market). If number go down, you end up with a higher dollar value and a higher btc amount too: your btc quantity goes up, since number went down and the result must make up for that, PLUS the arbitrage profit.
This could be one of the reasons why short interest in futures is always so high, and futures expiry dates are so often bloody for the hodlers - just like now.
I think I need more coffee.
Let's say I have 1 million dollars and 20 BTC (I haven't). I don't want to spend my dollars do buy more BTC for reasons.
Is there a way, playing with futures, that I can get more dollars, more BTC, or more dollars, same BTC, or more BTC, same dollars, in the end ?
