Arena Blog

Polymarket has offered perps with up to 20× leverage since September. A Bitcoin long there is liquidated after a 2.5 % move against it. Since 2024, that happened within a week after 64 % of all entry days, including 38.5 % of the weeks Bitcoin ended higher.

A YouTube rulebook promises +71 % on margin for 5× long grids when price rises and −20 % when it falls. Rebuilt on BTC, ETH and SOL, the gain comes from leverage, and falling markets cost 59 to 86 % on average.

The Smarter Web Company, a UK web agency, holds 2,830 bitcoin and is traded as a bitcoin stock. Checked against its own filings: you pay about 30 % more than the bitcoin that belongs to shareholders is worth, the bitcoin per share has fallen since April, a 12 % preferred dividend now costs more than the agency earns, and in July the company sold bitcoin at a 39 % loss to repay a loan. When the share makes sense, and when an ETF or your own coins do the same job for less.

Count in units of the asset, not in dollars: holding 1 coin always leaves you 1 coin. A 2x long gets closer to 2 the higher the price climbs, but never reaches it, and a halving takes everything. That holds for every asset. Since 2017, a 2x long would have been liquidated within a year after one in three entry days for Bitcoin and almost one in two for Ether.

A leveraged long grid was liquidated in 1 of 70 ninety-day windows since 2017 — because a grid never deploys more than half its notional. What leverage does instead: it deepens every drawdown and pays funding in the down windows.

Trump announced tariffs, $19 billion was force-sold — and three days later the market looked normal again. Sorting the occasion from the cause.

A leverage backtest rarely shows more return – often less. Why effective exposure = position × leverage decides, and where 5× would have liquidated your strategy in 2018.

Most trading strategies are sold to you as complete solutions. "Run this system, make money." Enter signal. Exit signal. Repeat. Base rate win percentages plastered across the landing page.

The perpetual is crypto's most-traded derivative — a future that never expires. To stop it drifting from spot, longs and shorts pay each other funding. How it works, who's really on the other side of your leveraged long, and why funding flips whole strategies.

With a CFD you never own the underlying — you make a difference bet with your broker. That's what makes the other side delicate: depending on the model, the broker profits from your loss. How CFDs work, what the EU rules changed, and what really matters.

Warrants and knock-out certificates are huge in German-speaking markets — and no instrument makes the other side this tangible: here the issuer is the seller, the market maker and the one quoting the price. How they work, what they're for, and why the barrier and issuer risk decide everything.

Futures sit underneath a huge share of what moves markets — yet most explanations stop at "a bet on price." What a future really is, what it's for, and the part almost nobody explains: who takes the other side, and how they manage the risk.