No, I'm not talking about welfare benefits (never a good idea to trade with money you can't afford to lose), I mean spot trading with an extra bonus.

Last week, I was looking at Banking again, checking interest rates. While I was at CoinEx (ref link, no forced KYC) , I noticed a thing that's a sort of a pre-built futures trading setup, where you buy or sell but also provide liquidity or something. I'm not very good at the technical side...!

In simple terms, you choose your coin (BTC or ETH), choose to buy or sell, then pick a price with an associated APY.

Regardless of whether your option hits, you get a little extra on the deal in the form of interest.

Every. Single. Trade.

Free money.

I have only seen this implemented at CoinEx, and it's so simple.

The downside is that the minimum trade is $100 (USDT or about that value in BTC/ETH).

That sucks for the smaller trader and, like the $50 minimum for copy trading at MEXC, grates on my aim of finding things that work whether you have $1 or $1,000.

But You Can't Lose, Right?

Well yes, you can, but it's a bit like that "impermanent loss" on yield farming.

When you put in an order, you lock your funds. You also set a price for that whole period.

So if Bitcoin was up at $82,000 and you put in a $100 buy at $78,000 with a 15-day lock and the price of BTC dropped steadily to $60,000 over that period, you would buy at $78,000 (your option choice), then your funds would be locked until the end of the 15-day period. You're stuck with $100 of BTC that's now worth about $77. Ouch.

The opposite's also true: if you choose a "sell high" and the price pumps way past your selling price, you've missed out on potential gains.

A real life example? Sure.

My first go at this was a "Buy low" for $500 USDT of BTC, with the price set at $81,750. Then BTC plumetted, my buy went through at the set price and my BTC was worth about $470 at the end of the lock period because the price went down to around $77,000.

The opposite would be where you sell BTC/ETH to USDT at a given price, the price keeps going up, so you sold at your price and ended up with less USDT than you could have had if you'd held on.

A lower sell price isn't such a big deal. A higher buy sucks, but as long as the market goes back up (longer term), you're still OK.

Lateral Thinking

Given that I (a) suck at trading and (b) don't understand futures very well, this looked like a dangerous setup, something to avoid.

But then I thought... "hang on, it's my usual spot trading with benefits!"

My normal method for doing a spot trade is to figure where I'd like to buy and set the trade. Then I figure what profit I want and set the sell. I try not to adjust either one of those and sit back, hands off, until the market triggers the buy/sell.

I can do that here, too (as long as the price isn't crazy volatile), with a set time period, and get a little extra.

"How so?" you ask.

If I'd bought BTC with a spot trade in my real life example above (at $81,750), I'd want a sell price that's higher. Let's say $83,000 - a gain of about 1.5% on the original buy, which I think is decent for short-term BTC trading. As I have mentioned, I was doing 1% trades originally, so that's a good target for me.

On CoinEx, I go to Earn > Dual Investment > Subscribe more (which ends up here), choose "Sell high" (BTC), sort by the sell price, and see there's an offer at $83,000 over 5 days at 21.08% APY. I'll take that, even though BTC's far more likely to stay low or drop further (IMHO) in the next 5 days - I'm not trying to predict prices, remember, I'm doing what I'd normally do to set up a spot sell for the BTC I bought.

So I put my 0.006 BTC in, which is $490.50 at buy price because dual investment rounds off at 3 decimals (the remaining $9.50 stays in my spot wallet as BTC). As you can see from the details, if BTC goes up to $83k, I'll get $499.35 (the normal sell amount plus a dollar and a bit); if BTC stays under $83k I keep my 0.006 and get an extra 0.00001628 BTC in interest (the same dollar and a bit).

If it doesn't sell by the end of those 5 days, I'll set up a similar option again, with the same sell price (if possible) and a nice APY.

With a bit of lateral thinking, there's no difference to my normal crappy trading attempts except I get free interest. Win-win. Love it.

The Strategy

As always, I messed around, THEN sat down, researched, and thought about ground rules. One day I'll learn to do things in the right order, I promise!

• I won't be doing this with my Banking funds. It's Trading with extras, as if it were completely normal spot trading.
• I won't be doing this with terms longer than a few days. I'm not an Oracle, I can't foresee prices 3 months away, and the interest on long periods sucks anyway. 7 days max, ideally shorter (which has higher APY for the same price).
• I may be tempted by the 200%, 400%, 600% APYs but I'm going to pick the target price for a normal spot buy/sell as long as it's 0-7 days. Exactly as I normally would for spot trading, no farting around with lower prices for high APY that doesn't cover the cost of the lower price (which I suck at calculating, too).
• It's great if I can get a nice percentage, but it's the normal sell that matters. The interest is gravy.
• Timing really matters. If there's no offer at the price I want within 7 days or the APY is lower than 15%, I'll drop the funds into flexible earning while I wait: interest is hourly, payment is daily, redemption is immediate. No loss, a little extra gain (for the price of regular monitoring)!

I think that covers it all. The most important part is NOT to think of it as futures trading or anything unusual (for me), but to approach it as I would spot trading, with strict rules as laid out above.

What do you think? Is it too dangerous or is it just normal trading with extra fiddly bits to manage?