Perpetual futures trade twenty-four hours a day. No weekends. No holidays. No bathroom breaks for the guy in Singapore who just realized he's been long since Tuesday.
Regular futures expire. They have a date. A time. A moment when the suffering ends and you can pretend it never happened. Perps don't expire. They just keep going. Like a slot machine that never stops spinning or a marriage you can't afford to leave.
Exchanges love this. Continuous trading means continuous fees. Retail traders love this because they've convinced themselves that access to liquidation at 3 a.m. on Christmas is somehow an opportunity rather than a mental health crisis with leverage.
The existential crisis is that Wall Street built an entire industry around the opening bell and the closing bell. Traders went home. They had dinner. They pretended to care about their families. Perps eliminated that. Now some poor bastard has to monitor a position while his kid blows out birthday candles because Bitcoin doesn't care that Ethan turned seven.
The urgent part is that traditional exchanges are bleeding volume to platforms offering perps. Investors want the ability to panic-sell at any hour of any day. They want to check their phone at 4 a.m. and see they've been margin-called while they were dreaming about beaches.
This is progress. We've taken the anxiety of daylight trading and stretched it across all twenty-four time zones. We've turned investing into a shift job except nobody gets overtime and everyone gets f*cked equally.
Wall Street's crying about it now because they showed up late. They spent decades pretending retail traders didn't exist and now those same idiots are on offshore exchanges trading perpetual contracts on dog-themed cryptocurrencies while Goldman Sachs writes think pieces about market structure.
The security is on steroids. The traders are on Adderall. The only thing that sleeps is common sense.
Photo by Larry Nalzaro on Unsplash
Leave a Comment