FxBrokerReviews.org – Imagine you spend $100 on bitcoin, expecting its price to rise 20%. In that case, you’ll get $20 in profit if you pay out. But what if you could invest with leverage or acquire bitcoin worth $1,000 with just $100 of your own money? If you did, you would have $200, doubling your initial investment. What if you could use that $100 to place a wager on the value of bitcoin falling and earn money by turning into a short seller? You can. Margin trading is a risky cryptocurrency method that allows you to “leverage” borrowed capital to increase gains and decrease losses.
Margin traders prefer futures and perpetual swap markets in the cryptocurrency space. Most significant crypto exchanges, such as Binance and FTX, provide margin trading options. The costs and available leverage ratios vary.
Warning: Margin trading increases risk. For example, you could lose your money if you can’t pay the debt after a tiny market movement that goes against your prediction. Cryptocurrency is a highly volatile market. When the dealers are asked to contribute more capital to secure their end of the trade, this is referred to as a “margin call.” (After the 2008 financial crisis, a perfect feature film on margin calls was released. Warning: This paragraph contains a spoiler. The bankers survive despite eliminating everyone else in the market.
What Is Margin Trading?
Leveraged trading, also known as margin trading, is placing bets on the cryptocurrency markets using “leverage” (loan money) and exposing a smaller portion of your capital. The amount of cryptocurrency required for a leveraged position is known as the margin.
Margin trading positions can be initiated in one of two ways:
- A short position is when you wager that the price will decline.
- A long position is when you wager on a price increase.
In a long position, you purchase a cryptocurrency to sell at a higher price later on and profit from the price difference. Additionally, this is achievable without margin. In a short position, you loan a cryptocurrency at its current price to repurchase it at a higher price later on.
Leverage is described in terms of ratios, like 20:1 or 100:1. As a result, if your trading account has $2,000. You want to start a long position with a 100:1 leverage ratio; you’ll need to put up collateral equal to 1% of your position size, which you must do with your own money. The cryptocurrency exchange will give the remaining 99%.
Crypto Margin Trading Example
Consider the following scenario: a trader opens a long position on Bitcoin for $100, and the price increases by 10%. The investor would profit $10. (excluding any fees). The profit for the same trader would be $50 (10 x 5 = 50) if they used a 5x leverage ratio.
Some cryptocurrency traders that use margin employ 10x, 50x, or even 100x leverage. Potential rewards can be increased this way, but the risks are substantially higher.
Also read: How To Start Cryptocurrency Trading: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
Why Trade On Margin?
Why trade on margin if you can store bitcoin and profit from price increases? There are a minimum of three causes.
- To enhance profits: Margin trading enables you to raise your potential gains if the market shifts in your favour.
- Danger management: If you possess a lot of BTC and wish to lessen your exposure to the risk of the price of bitcoin falling, you can hedge your position by taking a short post.
- Asset shorting is possible with a margin account. However, it is not possible with spot trading.
But the advantages come with their perils. Margin trading can increase profits, but you must use sound risk management to avoid losing money. Margin interest and other transaction charges may reduce your earnings even if margin trading may enable you to hedge your risks.
Keywords:
Collateral
The money in your margin account assures the broker that you can repay your debt.
A margin call
Your broker is requesting that you increase the amount in your margin account, and if you refuse, they may be forced to sell your cryptocurrency positions.
Limit-Stop Order
You must specify a stop, start, limit, and target price for the transaction and an execution timeframe for this conditional trade. When you wish, your business is filled. Depending on your selections, the deal is cancelled if the price increases or decreases.
Order To Stop Losses
It is a helpful tool for leveraged trading, much like a stop limit. You can set a stop-loss order to specify the maximum loss you will accept. If you set it to 5% and the asset’s price drops to that level or higher, it is promptly sold, resulting in a loss of only 5%.
Following Stop
This particular stop-loss order can secure gains. Anyone who wishes to put emotion aside while determining when to leave employment will find this helpful.
Cross-Margin Or Isolated Margin
The majority of exchanges will provide cross and isolated margins. For each trading pair, such as BTC/USDT or ETH/USDC, you must allocate a certain margin (your money to use as collateral) if you use an isolated margin. The advantage is that you can restrict your margin amount while isolating the risk to particular trading pairs.
Using cross margin, you can share the same margin (again, your collateral) across all open positions. The benefit is that it lowers your chance of individual holdings being liquidated, but you risk losing everything to save one place.
Also read: Crypto Futures Trading: Definition And How Does It Work?
Liquidation And Margin Call
The margin level refers to the amount of money you must have in your margin account to participate in the exchange. The exchanges will show you your current margin level and how “healthy” it is, i.e., how distant you are from liquidation (losing your money when you can’t pay the debt), which is the opposite of what it means to be liquidated.
You also run the risk of liquidation, the forced sale of your collateral (the money you put up as a margin) to compensate for the loss. This occurs automatically most of the time in cryptocurrency (“forced liquidation”).
Nevertheless, the trader will get a “margin call” from the cryptocurrency exchange before the risk materialises. A margin call is a warning that the trader needs to do something to stop liquidation. Some examples of these steps are lowering leverage, posting more collateral, or reducing the size of the position. A liquidation fee is frequently charged during forced liquidation. Each trade has a different cost.
Market-wide ramifications may result from liquidations. The market phenomenon known as a “liquidation cascade” can result from a sequence of prominent leveraged positions being liquidated, sending the price of a cryptocurrency into a steep decline due to massive amounts of forced selling.
How To Manage Risks?
Margin trading is a risky trade setting for beginners without a suitable risk management approach to lower the odds of “being rekt” or having their entire trading account wiped out. This is true even though it has its attractiveness. Here are some tips:
- Maintain a separate trading account; reserve only a fraction for margin trading.
- Use a stop-loss: Set a price below which you want the exchange to close out your position. This will help you to reduce losses and remove the possibility of total loss.
- Take profit: While doing so at particular price points lowers your overall earnings, it improves your ability to control risk.
- Avoid trading as payback. It may be tempting to make up your losses in a single deal after suffering losses in the cryptocurrency markets, but you should always weigh your risks.
How Does Crypto Margin Trading Work?
Cryptocurrency margin trading entails borrowing money to execute larger or more trades. But the so-called liquidation price is something to bear in mind. The exchange automatically closes a business once the market hits the liquidation cost. This is performed to protect traders from losing more than just their money.
The liquidation price for a futures contract on an asset is zero when dealing with only one’s capital. However, when leverage rises, the liquidation price increases toward the price a trader purchases.
Margin lending enables investors to create long or short positions, allowing them to profit regardless of the market’s direction (yes, it is possible to fast Bitcoin).
Consider the case where one Bitcoin (BTC) costs $10,000. An investor who wishes to trade Bitcoin on margin creates a long position by purchasing one Bitcoin using a 2x leverage. So, for a job worth $20,000 before fees and interest, they would have spent $10,000 and borrowed another $10,000.
The liquidation price in this situation would be just over $5,000. The trader would lose their entire investment plus interest and fees once this level is reached.
This is why: Normally, if a trader bought $10,000 worth of bitcoins, the price would need to fall to zero before they would lose their whole stake. However, the stake has been doubled due to the 2x leverage. A trader has multiplied their prospective gains or losses by doubling their initial investment. As a result, if the price drops by 50%, they lose their entire investment (50 x 2 = 100).
Because fees are part of the cost to initiate the trade, the special liquidation price in this example would be little more than 50% less than the buy price.
Where Can You Trade Crypto On Margin?
The following cryptocurrency exchanges permit traders to trade on margin:
- Binance Futures
- BitMEX
- Phemex
- Huobi Futures.
- Bybit
- KuCoin Futures
- PrimeXBT.
- ApolloX
- The Delta Exchange
Leverage available on these exchanges ranges from 10x to 125x. In each market, trading with leverage has risk, and the more leverage employed, the greater the danger. The tremendous volatility in the cryptocurrency markets makes margin trading considerably risky.
What Are The Fees For Crypto Margin Trading?
When trading cryptocurrency on margin, there are two fees to consider:
- Cost of filling a position
- Interest accrued on coin borrowing
Peer-to-peer interest rates, also referred to as “funding rates,” are determined by several variables, including the current spread between an asset’s spot and futures prices. This rate is typically updated every hour.
Pros And Cons Of Crypto Margin Trading
There are advantages and disadvantages to margin trading in cryptocurrencies, just like any other investment approach. This diagram shows them.
| Pros | Cons |
| Possibility of making significant income quickly | Extremely risky, and any increase in volatility raises the stakes even higher. |
| It enables traders to open more prominent positions with less money. | Traders run the risk of losing a lot of money quickly. Trades may be closed off at a loss during periods of volatility before traders can respond. |
| It can offer a means to place profitable trades during minor market fluctuations. | Requires almost exact market timing
|
| Permits traders to hold less cryptocurrency on an exchange |
Given that leverage amplifies market movements, a trader must close out a position when it is profitable. Leveraged trading can result in significant losses for novice traders.
FAQs
1. Is margin trading profitable for crypto?
Cryptocurrency margin trading can be highly profitable when it works. Traders may often profit from their initial investment if they open a long position just before a price increase. Of course, the inverse is also possible, given how volatile the cryptocurrency markets are. In a short period, significant losses might be incurred.
2. The ideal coin for margin trading is?
Depending on the person. Due to its lower volatility when compared to other coins (note: that’s still a lot of volatility), Bitcoin may be the best coin for someone wishing to enter cryptocurrency margin trading with the least amount of risk. Others consider smaller coins ideal because they can yield more returns in a shorter time.
The Lesson
Professional traders frequently use margin trading in the cryptocurrency market. Using leverage can result in “long squeezes”, “short squeezes,” or excessive market movements where a fast price change can cause liquidations and increase volatility. Compared to most traditional markets, the cryptocurrency markets, which trade quite thinly, frequently experience this.
