The Perfect Exchange to Trade Crypto

Puh, what a journey!

Since Binance announced to shut down Futures-Trading for my Country, I have been on the hunt for an adequate alternative. I hopped from exchange to exchange just to see my expectations rise. I decided to write a small summary to save one or two from going trough dozens of registrations, deposits, withdrawals and KYCs.

Here is which features I am looking for

• Good transparency. That is, I want to see my current fees (they often depend on countless parameters, such as trading amount). Also, I want to see my realized PL alongside the unrealized PL. Often, you can see only your unrealized PL. If you want to know how much fees you are spending on a particular trade, this can be a little tedious.
• One-click, partially closing a trade. Almost all exchanges offer the option to choose how much of the trade you want to close if the klick the close button. They offer you, for example, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% or similar in a separate pop-up menu. FTX for example, does not offer this. You can close a trade completely or you need to create a new order manually to close a trade partially.
• “Bracket-orders” (as Delta-Exchange calls it)
  That means your Take-Profit and Stop-Loss orders stay stable even if you change your order amount. For example on Kucoin: If you close a trade partially or if you increase a trade, you need to cancel your SL- and TP-orders first. This makes sense, since a SL- and TP-order must match the trade amount. Most exchanges luckily dynamically modify those orders in the background to match the changed trade amount so the user does not need to take care about this.
• Drag-and-Drop Orders
  My favorite feature. It is not very essential maybe but I think this gives me a decent productivity boost: I see my SL- and TP-orders in the trading chart. And I can drag them higher or lower, which will modify those orders to the new price. Super handy feature, imo.
• Auto-Margin Top-Up
  When you open a leveraged long, I like to have the option to automatically top-up the margin if the trade is coming close to liquidation territory. You know those nasty liquidation wicks. In oder to survive them, this can be a handy feature.
• Cross Margin
  All your trades use the same “margin-pool”, that is, your whole account balance. Can be a very comfortable feature, as you can for example open a hedge trade on the same margin but can also wipe your trading account completely.
• Change trade Margin of an Open Trade
  After you opened an isolated-margin trade, you want to increase or decrease your trade margin. For example, you can free up some margin for other trades if you increase the margin of your open trades.
• Trading Fees
  Not the most important feature, since I have the feeling there is no big differences between most of the exchanges.
• Trading Pairs
  Could be most important, if the exchange does not offer your favorite altcoin. I found all exchanges to offer the pairs I like.
• Performance/ Stability
  Oh man. Sad that this needs to be mentioned here. But don’t take this for granted. A lot of exchanges, even the biggest ones, run again and again into serious performance issues especially when the market rallies or crashes.
• Dark mode
  some people prefer a dark color layout. Delta-Exchange or example has only a dark theme, which I personally do not like so much during day times.

So here comes a dense pro-/contra list of exchanges I have tested

Kucoin

Cons:
- No Cross Leverage
- No drag/ drop orders in the chart
- No increasing of the margin once the trade is open (Only via opening a new trade with higher margin)
Pros:
+ Good (I think the best) fees
+ Realized PL is displayed
+ Auto-marin top-up.
+ Excellent choice of trading pairs.

Delta Exchange

Cons:
- Knock-out criteria: terrible stability! Even in times of medium trading volume, the exchange disconnects, is not reachable or does not execute orders. Very poor!
Pros:
+ Next to Bybit, my favorite interface.
+ Very good selection of trading-pairs

Bybit

Cons:
- Nothing so far!

Pros:
+ Cross Margin
+ Drag-and-Drop orders
+ Change or margin
+ Auto-top-up
+ …. it has it all, as far as I can tell right now!

FTX

Cons:
- No one-click partial trade close.
- No SL-/TP-orders integration, every order is treated the same, means you need to open a SL- or TP-order manually.
- Knock-out criteria: That also means your SL- and TP-orders do not adapt to a changing trade amount. Makes SL/TP management very tedious.
Pros:
+ Good performance/ stability. Beautiful interface.
+ Excellent choice of trading-pairs.

Summary

So to sum it all up, I choose Bybit to trade coin-USDT-futures. It matured a lot in the last months or so, near perfect exchange!

If you liked this summary, I would be happy if you signed up using my referral code: Q1527

Sign up at ByBit:
https://www.bybit.com/en-US/invite?ref=Q1527