A while back, I toy traded Futures derivatives on BitMex and that now seems like a dubious place to be at the moment! At that time, BitMex was pretty much the only place offering derivatives trading on any real scale with a decent user interface and volume.
Over the last year or so, Kucoin and Binance released their versions of the futures derivatives with perpetual contracts. Seeing as these are the two exchanges that I use the most often, I thought it would be nice to try them out to see if they had features that would make it easy for person who just did little trades on the side to play around in.
Kucoin was the first to catch my attention, as they were running a contest on TRX/USD perpetual contracts. Depending on the contract, they offer up to 100x margin (which you have to be absolutely nuts to want!). I tend to trade at 10x leverage which gives me quite a good leeway on cutting losses and avoiding liquidations. Annoyingly, the leverage seems to reset occasionally to the default 20x which is a little risky for my taste... I'm not sure what is causing that, but it is really not nice as it can lead you to make a trade at higher leverage than expected.
It offers the usual limit and stop orders in a similar manner to the spot markets. The order book has this weird Long/Short indicator... something to help feed FOMO I guess? What is unclear is the funding fee and period indicator for when the funding fee needs to be paid on positions.
After taking a position, they have a really nice layout of displaying the PNL and other details of your position. What is even nicer is the ability to set two easy orders to either take profit or stop loss... for someone who isn't constantly checking and shifting these positions, it is nice to set and forget.... or at least check later. Sure, you can easily do it from stop and limit orders... but to have it front and centre on the position is something that will help traders stick to good trading habits!
Doing it like this means that you only have the all or nothing ability to close positions... not flexible, but suitable for my sort of trading. If you want to close in stages, you can set your own stop orders from the purchase page.
The Binance offering is similar in the purchase stage with one huge notable exception! The ability to set trailing stop orders! This is something that I've loved from one of the other exchanges (I forget which one now...|), and it means that you will have a stop market order trailing the market price on either the buy/sell side and lagging by a set amount (0.2% in the above image). This means that you can get the highest possible sell price, or the lowest possible buy prices... assuming that you set your trailing margin not too small or big! It is a great way for poking away at price swings... or for trailing a volatile price. Plus, it takes away the emotion out of following a rapidly moving price swing.
The position tab is also clearly laid out with relevant information. You can set your stop profit and loss from the middle tab. It will meant that you will set them separately with a "reduce only" order and the relevant information is hidden in open orders page. Not ideal, I would prefer that it was more like the Kucoin version. However, it does work... but up front information would be better on the tab about the stop orders.
It is more flexible than the Kucoin version as you can layer your closing orders... so, there is something in that!
Conclusion
So, both Kucoin and Binance offer decent liquidity on their futures derivatives. As for user interface... I do prefer the Binance version. The Trailing Stop order type is the killer order type for me... when I first encountered it, I wanted it everywhere... but this is the first time that I have seen it elsewhere.
Now that I have a favourite way of trading futures, I think I will be exploring the market a bit further to see if I have a preference for any. At the moment, I've been doing okay on the ETH/USDT perpetual... but I do really do want to move into coin settled contracts to try and grow my BTC rather than stablecoin settled contracts. We'll see... it is risky business!
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