Thus far, we've seen some extreme market movement in 2020. The past several weeks have not been the prettiest. 2 Confirmed ddos attacks, FCoin claiming to have a module deleted then admitting a $130 Million loss, a few hundred manual withdrawal returns, a re-launch promised to return a small portion of funds to others, and a series of complete outages on the likes of Robinhood, unannounced maintenance from Binance, Bitrue, Bitoffer and others. How's a person supposed to trust this nonsense?

In my recent post about the need for better exchanges, I covered a myriad of issues I believe are plaguing the industry and crippling the growth of crypto.

I'm going to focus on one thing in particular that makes me really angry. If it were this blatant in regular stock trading, those running the platforms would be in jail.

The moral of the story is going to end up being that people really need to hard focus on either doing their own investing in a safe environment, or learn how to spot trade with skill, using indicators and taking in a lot of advice for TA and FA (technical and fundamental analysis both).

So, options trading is the hot ticket these days. Every exchange is adding more and more 'options' to options trading. Guessing at futures, digital 1 minute binary gambling, speculation to an hour, 4 hours, days etc. There are certain protections against liquidation in some instances, while others with the most rigid leverage options may liquidate assets when a certain threshold is reached.

I will state plainly, that I've tested my skills with just a few dollars just to see if my instinct was correct. 

I tend to go months making hundreds of trades without a stop loss and without making an error. I focus on small, steady profits and even that has a huge statistical likelihood that, even with indicators, I will be wrong 47%-ish of the time. But, despite this success in regular spot trading, doing short term options guessing whether Bitcoin will simply go up or down in a short time, I 'played' until I lost it all (again, just a few bucks).

I know how to read the market; I do it all the time. It is very likely if someone were to run a test, I would win for watching Bitcoin for more hours for months and now years, than anyone else in the world. I cannot accurately guess within the final seconds whether the price of Bitcoin will be within pennies higher or lower from a minute or two before.

But, that is just a small cautionary tale. Here's the real kick. When guessing at futures and options, we're doing a call or a put, deciding whether we believe Bitcoin (or what other top coins allowed) will be up or down by a certain amount.

In this example, I share BitOffer's option.

Here's what the layout looks like:

Notice how they have placed a list of prominent, reliable, well-known centralized exchanges in the Spot Index on the left.

This is to let us know the going market price for spot trading Bitcoin, reliable from $8737 to $8771.

This is to give the speculator the confidence that it will go up to the needed strike price when the contract time ends.

Notice the current value provided by Bitoffer at the time of this screen shot is $8738; perfectly within the range shown in the spot index.

How many people would load the websites to see where things stand? They've conveniently laid it out for us right there.

Here's the part that makes me angry. This is the screen shot from the actual Okex exchange from 10 second later- and no, the values were not different:

The price at the same time was $8724 on Binance.

Here's the discrepancy:

Okex real price: $8725. Bitoffer posted current spot value: $8737. The difference in USDT and USD at the time of this post was $.27 on Binance and similar on others, in case anyone thinks the difference was attributed to Tether vs. actual dollar.

The boost in value by around $20-30 at a time for the call makes it impossible for the person to know if they will be within the real window of spot price or not. The values are intentionally inaccurate. This is not unique to Bitoffer. Robinhood sources their spot value for crypto from multiple exchanges and inflates the possible limit buy and market buy upwards of the current real market price, takes the spread as profit, and the same goes for limit sell and market sell; the value one can sell at is artificially lower than market. You have to essentially be right about the price by a buffer of as much as $20-30 more and less than the real market price. In the case of Robinhood, it is normal practice to offer a high market price in a market list, and then have a tighter spread on the 'pro' charts. In Robinhood's case, the inflated price is the only one offered, but they do not falsely report the current price of others to mislead the user into thinking the price is different. It's blatant in the Bitoffer example, they don't mind posting completely inaccurate listing values from the actual exchanges that are supposed to have those values.

I don't know which kinds of contracts, perpetual, futures, different forms of expiry you enjoy, but my advice is to test everything always. My trust in platforms only diminishes each new time I search for better choices. Be vigilant and protect your assets best you can.

Gordon Freeman Out.