Damned if I know. Maybe they lied to us. I'm looking for an opportunity to trade bitcoin. Being able to trade 24/7 looks to be a critetia I would want. I was surprised at the fees involved when I looked into where I might open a crypto account. It doesn't look like those trading crypto from Canada are very forthcoming.
And that's a bad thing? Sleep, R&R, quality time with family? Trading/life balance? Only joking but it's not always a good thing being able to trade something 24x7x365.
I've decided to go with Newton. A Canadian registered broker. Supposedly a no fee broker but there is still the spread although it looks to be reasonable compared to other exchanges. No fees for deposits or withdraws on fiat and a minimal network fee for crypto. Started the application process and have got as far as the manual review and am waiting to hear from them.
Newton is great as a starter broker. Like you say, no fees on deposits, and also no fees on withdrawals. But the spread is really a killer for trading. Spread is the lowest on bitcoin, but its still 0.92%! If you put in a limit order to buy at $29k for example, and you see it hit multiple times and you don't get a fill, and then you find out that because of the spread, it needs to hit like 28.7 in order for you to get your fill. https://www.newton.co/prices Also, keep in mind that Newton quotes all prices in Canadian, so this is confusing when you want to follow the crypto market that always quotes in USD. I suggest as a trader, start with Newton as a way to get your first crypto since its easy to fund with a Canadian bank account, and then open up an account with FTX. The fees are super low, and you can even sign up with some video sponsors to get a free $30 in trading fees and life time lower costs. Here is the one I used. https://guy.coinbureau.com/ftx/ With Newton, the withdrawal is free, so buy some bitcoin, send to FTX, and start trading! Then if you have lots of profits, send back to Newton, and you can easily do an Interac withdrawl to your bank account in literally an hour.
@NoahA I assume this is what you are doing. What is the difference in trading cost? How about leaving your coin on the exchange? Do you move it to your own wallet for security reasons. I noticed that Newton claims never to have been hacked.
Yes, everything I have described I have done myself. I don't really trade crypto, so can't comment on the cost too deeply. For a while, Newton didn't even have limit orders, so they have come a long way! The charts are a total mess to be honest. You click on the 4hr and see a different price than on the 5 min. Its really a pain to try and use Newton for active trading I would think. But its a great on ramp. I mean look at other exchanges charging 1% or higher just to deposit your money! Obviously Newton makes back any savings on fees via the spreads, so don't get caught doing this. I had to email support once because I assumed my limit order would fill at the price that I want. I thought the spread was built into the price, but its not. Right now for example, this is the latest price for bitcoin. The ASK is 29.72, BID is 29.18 lets say, and this means the actual price is about 29.5 (right in the middle). So your chart will show 29.5 as the current price, and say you have a buy limit set at 29.5, and you get no fill. Its very confusing to not get a fill. But because of the spread, your limit order will only fill once price drops down to 29.18 price, even though your limit buy is at 29.5 With FTX, it fills at the limit price you set and you pay a very small fee of less than 0.1% I think. This is at least 5x better than Newton. (assuming 0.9% spread, so about 0.5% for a buy or sell on either side of the price) If you are trading crypto, then you clearly have to leave it on the exchange unless you plan to hold for weeks I guess. With Netwon, since the fees are so high, they don't need to do any lending I don't think like Voyager which did lending and then had to stop withdrawls. I guess Netwon can always be hacked, and what protections you have I'm not sure, even though they quote they are insured. The bulk of my crypto is bitcoin and yes, its on a hardware wallet. I also have some Bitcoin ETFs, and I assume those have some sort of protections and they claim the assets are in cold storage. But like I say, I'm not trading crypto really. Maybe I would buy some more if I see a massive pump since a 5x or so should be easy when it really starts to move, but I don't see that happening anytime soon to be honest, so its just sitting in storage.
If I trade it will be trying to catch a long term trend. I'm not planning on day trading although I'll have a tight stop on my initial trade. One of the pro's of crypto (I'll only be looking at bitcoin) is the speed it can be transfered. How long in your experience does it take to move BTC from your wallet to an exchange? I'm hoping an hour or two max. If that's the case then I can hold BTC in a cold wallet and then move it and trade it in a timely manner.
Going from wallet to the exchange is fast because you have the option of how much you want to spend to do it. If the network is busy, and you want your transaction to go into the next block, you will have to pay a higher fee. Depending on what hardware wallet you use, it should have options to specify how much you want to spend, and also an option to replace the fee with a higher one in case your transaction is stuck in the mem pool because you used a low fee and the miners are too busy processing only the transactions with higher fees. You can use this link to see how busy the network is to get an idea. https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,2d,weight The other factor though is how many confirmations the exchange needs to accept the transaction as being final. For example, after only 1 confirmation, I doubt an exchange will allow you to trade those bitcoin because there is still a slight chance the block might later be invalidated. So even if you get into the next block, and hence your transaction is confirmed in less than 10 minutes, you might still need to wait a few more blocks before the exchange lets you sell that bitcoin. When I transfer out of an exchange, Newton was very fast, but others had delays. So you're stuck sitting there hoping you copied the address right. Its such a relief when you look into your wallet software and see the transaction as being now in the mem pool. With Newton, this can literally happen in a minute when transferring out after the initial 5 minute delay. But once it says that its processed and gives you a link for the confirmation details, in seconds in shows up in your software hardware wallet since the transaction has been announced to the network and at least you know its coming.