This is not a good trade and here I’ll outline the reason.<p>1- You need to borrow GBTC to be able to short it. The borrowing comes at a cost “interest rate”<p>2- Futures themsleves comes with a premium and require rolling over. It is 100% stupid to use futures instead of the real thing: just buy bitcoin.<p>3- You won’t be able to cash out until the GBTC premium dissapears. If you are small this might never happens.
4- You might also find yourself in a bad situation: Bitcoin price goes up. You’ll need to supplement capital to your short. That can be an arbitrairly high amount of USD.
5- 4 can be fixed with futures as they allow you to withdraw non realized gains. But it comes at the price of paying for rollover premium.
6- GBTC high price might be due to illiquidity. Not interest.<p>Tldr: don’t follow this guy. Very sophisticated trade and not clear if it can be profitable.
Citron's entire business is shorting investments and then trying to cause a panic with negative PR to move the market in their favor. It is shocking that what they do is legal.<p>This doesn't mean they are wrong here, but I wouldn't describe them as a trusted source either.
It really is the Wild West of crypto currency right now.
Greed is going to fuel a lot more arbitrage opportunities like these as people invest in crypto "derivatives" without fully understanding what they are buying.
> Citron would not be pounding table if not appropriate,” he wrote. “Thank you for the 70 percent profit.”<p>So Bitcoin is up several 1000%s on the year and he is beating his chest from a 70% profit on the short side?
> The futures are already showing signs of efficiency. When they debuted a week ago, Cboe’s traded for a price as much as 13 percent higher than the price of bitcoin -- a wide gap indicating an immature market<p>Can someone explain this to me? If the market expects the price to go up a lot, why wouldn't the futures trade at a large premium?