The blog

What a trade actually costs

Every exchange publishes a fee schedule and almost nobody explains it. These are the pieces we would want to read if we were the ones paying.

Fees · 9 min read

Maker or taker: which one you actually are, and what it costs

Every exchange publishes two rates and almost none explains which one you will be charged. The honest answer is that most traders are on the expensive side far more often than they believe, and not because of anything they decided.

Markets · 9 min read

The funding rate on perpetual futures, and who actually pays it

It is the line traders notice last and complain about most. It is not a fee, it is not charged by the venue, and on a position held for weeks it can cost more than every trading fee you paid to open and close it.

Fees · 9 min read

How leverage changes your fee bill, and the part nobody mentions

Everybody understands that leverage multiplies exposure. Far fewer notice that it multiplies the fee bill by exactly the same factor, on every single trade, whether the trade worked or not.

Markets · 9 min read

How to read an order book, and what it will never tell you

A book is the most honest object on an exchange: every line is an order somebody has actually committed to. It is also the most over-interpreted, because a commitment can be withdrawn in a millisecond and most of them are.

Crypto · 9 min read

What actually moves the price of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the only large asset whose supply schedule was written down before it launched and has never changed. That makes the question unusually clean: if the supply side is fixed, everything that moves the price is on the other side of the trade.