Futures and Margin Trading on BitMEX

BitMEX is a trading platform that offers investors access to the global financial markets using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. BitMEX was established by financial professionals with a combined professional experience of over 40 years. BitMEX provides a comprehensive API and corresponding support tools. BitMEX is owned by HDR Global Trading Limited.

A perpetual futures is a product that trades much like a traditional futures, but it doesn’t expire, so you can hold it for as long as you like. Perpetual futures are similar to spot trading, closely tracking the underlying price index. It uses a capital fee mechanism to ensure that its price closely follows the underlying price. BitMEX uses the fair price marking method to mark contracts. This price determines your unrealized profit and loss. Realized profit or loss is determined by your opening price and closing price or settlement price and other fees.

A futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell a commodity, currency or other product at a predetermined price at a specified time in the future.

BitMEX indices are calculated using a weighted average of the latest traded prices.

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BitMEX’s leveraged trading

BitMEX offers leverage on all of its products.

The leverage offered by BitMEX varies by product. Leverage is determined by the Initial Margin and Maintenance Margin levels. They determine the minimum capital you need to open and maintain a position. Leverage is not a fixed multiple, but a minimum margin requirement.

You can view the minimum initial and maintenance margin levels for all products here.

The highest leverage offered by BitMEX is 100x perpetual Bitcoin/USD perpetual contract.

The starting margin is the minimum amount of cryptocurrency required to open a position.

Maintenance margin is the minimum amount of cryptocurrency you need to maintain your existing position. If the margin balance of your position on BitMEX falls below this level, your position will be taken over by the liquidation engine and liquidated.

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Trading Cost and Fees on BitMEX

For simplicity, the BitMEX platform uses a standard transaction fee structure for all products. BitMEX’s liquidity rebate is 0.01%, and BitMEX’s liquidity withdrawal fee is 0.075%. For high volume traders, BitMEX offers discounts on withdrawal liquidity fees as listed in the table below. These fees will automatically apply to all instruments based on your 30-day rolling Average Daily Volume (ADV) calculated daily at 08:00 GMT+8 (00:00 UTC).

BitMEX does not charge fees on withdrawals of Bitcoin. When withdrawing Bitcoin, the minimum network fee for Bitcoin will be dynamically set according to the current congestion level of the blockchain, which can be viewed on the withdrawal page.

BitMEX charges a transaction fee for every completed transaction.

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What is Lot Size?

Lot size (measured by the number of contracts) is the minimum trading unit and minimum position size of a contract. The order quantity and position size need to be exact multipliers of the contract lot size. Order quantities that are not a lot multiplier will be rejected. Please refer to the individual contract specification pages for the lot size of each contract.

For example, a contract with a lot size of 100 will allow orders of 100, 200, 500 or 1000 contracts, but will deny orders of 1, 5, 10, 35, 125 or 250 contracts. Likewise, a user’s position size may be 100, 200, 500 or 1000 contracts, but not 1, 5, 10, 35, 125 or 250 contracts.

Sometimes it may be necessary to increase the lot size of a contract. In this case, the order and position may be rounded down to the nearest lot, which means that the “odd lot” portion of the position will be closed.

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