macrocephalopod

I exited all of my PA crypto positions over the last week so I thought it might be interesting to look back over the last three months, what worked, what didn't, and what surprised me.

I had a few constraints - I wanted to make reasonably consistent profits, I didn't want big drawdowns (2-3% max) and I didn't want to spend more than 10-15 minutes a day trading. The obvious thing was to do cash/futures arbitrage.

Registering for exchanges was easy. Transferring in fiat took a couple more days but was also pretty simple. First lesson was that the default "buy crypto" link on a lot of exchanges rips you off on both exchange rate and commission. Go to the order book instead!

Next problem is getting into a hedged position. You need to buy spot/short futures, but you need spot crypto to collateralise your futures account before you can start trading futures, so legging risk is unavoidable. I entered a tiny position first, and then bootstrapped it.

Once you have a position on it's much easier to add to it, because you can do a near simultaneous spot/futures trade and temporarily run a leveraged futures position (e.g. 50% collateralized) while you wait for your spot to transfer to your futures wallet.