This was my favorite part of the article: "Traditionally, to open a hedge fund, you have to spend time building your own reputation, complying with legal requirements, finding anchor capital for investment, marketing and finding brokers to work with. All of which takes time, experience and money. However, in the world of bitcoin, there’s no room for such old-fashioned methods. According to a new service called Fund Platform “there are not enough cryptocurrency funds in the world because development costs a lot of money” so, it has set out to rectify this problem. According to its marketing materials, Fund Service “acts as a platform where traders in private offices create funds in a few minutes” and traders can create funds “without pouring huge amounts of money into marketing and creating websites.”
Yes that is what disruptive technologies do. "FinTech" (as it's called now), started in 2008 and see how fast it's changing our world.
My point is that you are getting pieces of the price changes if you are a talented trader but you are not getting the long term gains in actually owing the coin. Sort like missing out on a long term hold on Google by not buying it early after in went public but still profiting on options of Google if you are good enough to foresee short term swings.
Huh? Doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of trading? I mean why trade anything when you can just buy and hold? Obviously it's because one believes they can achieve better risk adjusted returns. Therefore it's possible one will earn "more" profits by trading BTC vs simply being a buy and hold investor.
@Maverick74 and @JackRab Yeah you both have valid points, but I think those who can do this and have the capital and courage to sleep through a $1200 weekend on bitcoin are few.
I'm guessing most holders of bitcoin do... and I still don't see why a futures trader can't do that either... it's just a different strategy then. If I think price will go up to a certain level, then I hold longer... prefer to be in and out in minutes... but sometimes it takes a few days....
This is exactly what people who own the coin do. But the futures holder will at least be able to buy puts and hedge.
All the coin holders that I know have it salted away for the next few years so these $2,000 drops mean nothing to them. I sense that leveraged futures traders would be having heart attacks like last weekend. Buy a derivative then buy another derivative to hedge the first derivative. That gets too mind boggling for me.
You're assuming traders in futures all trade leveraged... which isn't necessarily true... If I want to buy 40k USD worth of bitcoin... I could also just buy 1 future... as a matter of fact, I think lots of people will prefer the future because it's regulated...