FX Prop Is Dying. Join Crypto.
5 minutes read
1. 4. 2024
FX currently dominates the prop trading space.
While futures and crypto have seen a modest increase in popularity, FX is the most popular market.
Breakout is a crypto-only prop firm built by crypto native traders, investors, and builders. While we’re undoubtedly biased on this matter, it is our view that FX traders should consider expanding their trading to include crypto.
The immediate retort might be “But my FX prop firm also offers crypto!”
No – it doesn’t.
Your FX prop firm likely offers garbled crypto CFDs with wide spreads, archaic listings, and at times even limited trading hours.
Breakout is the first and only prop firm to offer crypto trading with liquidity sourced from a tier 1 centralized exchange (Bybit), 80+ constantly-updated listings, and 24/7 trading. Our pricing and liquidity are derived from Bybit’s perpetual futures contracts – the most liquid and highly-traded instruments in crypto. Breakout is the only firm that is fully in tune with the needs of crypto-native traders, and this involves the ability to list new coins at the same pace as major centralized exchanges. Start trading with Breakout today.
Trading conditions aside, there are plenty of other reasons why FX traders should consider expanding their trading to include crypto. This article will outline a few of them.
Crypto is always available to trade.
No weekends. No public holidays. No obtuse opening and closing hours.
Crypto trades 24/7.
Beyond the convenience factor of always being able to trade a market, 24/7 generally expands the scope of opportunities on any given week to trade, pass an evaluation, and get funded.
5 trading days (with sometimes odd hours) vs 7 trading days (24/7) makes a difference. Especially given that weekends in crypto can be rife with altcoin opportunities and setups that simply do not happen in FX.
Lastly, aside from being closed on the weekend, FX traders have to deal with some form of high impact news almost every week. While this may ordinarily present an opportunity to trade, it is common for FX firms to place restrictions around news trading (if not prohibit it entirely).
Crypto, on the other hand, offers opportunities every day – without the ‘help’ of an economic calendar.
Liquid crypto is a traders’ paradise.
Rather than levering up 1000x to make lunch money from a 0.0001% move in some major currency pair, high market cap high liquidity crypto pairs move 5%-20% in a day quite regularly.
For traders, volatility means opportunity, and crypto is king of that realm.
Rather than levering up and staring at the 1-minute chart to scalp EUR/USD at the open, crypto allows you to quite comfortably day trade and swing trade much larger moves without the need for extremely high leverage or the use of micro time frames.
While altcoins generally correlate quite positively with BTC (even this has been strained recently), there is a lot of dispersion among altcoins themselves.
This means that out of the dozens of liquid altcoins available in the market – with over 80 of them available on Breakout – there are plenty of opportunities to trade both directions on any given day.
Rather than having to determine a bias from DXY or EUR/USD, crypto allows you to find uncorrelated coins, isolated moves, narrative-based trades, pair trades, and more.
In general, crypto trading is less ‘top heavy’ and thus presents a wider range of trade opportunities.
Swing trading is one of the more popular trading styles in the prop space.
Unlike in FX, where the % moves are much smaller and swings may take weeks and months to resolve on high time frames, crypto swing trades are plentiful and move very quickly – especially if the market is at a cyclical turning point.
Additionally, crypto swings tend to be less choppy – if your timing is right at a key inflection point, the market generally wastes no time in moving in your favor and it does so quickly.
These swings either validate or invalidate your ideas pretty quickly, meaning less time lost to ambiguous chop while you sit in a trade whose outcome is still unclear weeks (potentially even months) down the line.
Crypto is predicated on innovation.
As a result, it is common to see many new coins become popular – especially if the market is hot.
These coins are unburdened by historic holders looking to unload, and newer participants do not have past price action to anchor their views.
Additionally, newer traders generally flock towards these new listings, which generally makes for much ‘cleaner’ price action.
Given these new opportunities are often retail-heavy, basic price action, patterns, and technical indicators are more reliable as 1) the valuation of something new is a tricky exercise; and 2) those are primarily the tools used by newer traders, thus creating an order herding effect.
In summary, new listings entail more opportunities.
Crypto attracts many first-time market participants, for whom trading these markets is their first foray into speculation.
Candidly, this means less sophistication, more inefficiencies, and more opportunities for good trades.
This is similar to the idea of table selection in poker: if you want to do well, you’re probably not going to pick the table with the sharks if you can avoid it.
As per the previous point, especially on newer coins, the types of participants are both relatively new to markets while also being technical analysis-focused. In essence, this means you’ll be trading against on average less experienced traders using straightforward TA and indicator signals, which are easy to identify and take advantage of.
Compared to the funds and desks managing hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars in FX, your counterparties in crypto are (on average) less experienced and the trading environment is less competitive on the whole.
The preceding list inexhaustive. There are plenty of other reasons to trade crypto.
Honorable mentions go to seamlessly integrated payment options all done via crypto, the availability of level 2 data at either low or no cost, and the regulatory and operational uncertainties that appear to be plaguing FX firms across the board.
In any case, we hope you are at least interested in trying crypto trading.
Breakout is the best place to do so – the first and only prop firm with transparent and verifiable centralized exchange pricing and liquidity, built by crypto natives, and a proud 0 payout denials as part of our track record.
Start your Breakout Evaluation today.
