Another thing I talk about a lot in my posts are my derivative strategies I use (cash n carry, delta neutral spreads, arb, etc). Some quant actually wrote a really good article regarding this strat. Since I cannot share the link without being slapped on the hand by TradingView, here is the gist of it:
"Delta neutral is a type of strategy where the total exposure to a specific asset is 0. For example, let’s say you spot a price difference between Binance and FTX. A way you could make money out of this is to lend 1ETH on Binance and sell it. Buy 1ETH on FTX and send it over to Binance to repay your loan. This way you have no exposure but can still make a profit. So, what exactly are funding rates? The funding rate is a mechanism to ensure that the perpetual futures contract price stays near the index or price of the underlying. If the perpetual is trading at a premium to the underlying index, long positions pay funding to the short positions. If the perpetual is trading at a discount to the underlying index, short positions pay funding to long positions. The funding rate to be paid/received is determined by the following formula:
position size * TWAP of ((future — index) / index) / 24
This is an example from FTX, but the formula differs from exchange to exchange depending on their funding rate interval.
How can we profit from this mechanism?
In the following example, we have a stable funding rate of 0.0198%/hour for the Bitcoin (BTC) perpetual future (i.e. BTC-PERP). This means that the longs will pay the shorts. To collect this funding rate all we have to do is short the BTC-PERP to get paid an hourly fee for our position.
But of course, this will create an exposure to the BTC price, which we don’t want. So we buy 1 BTC on the spot market to hedge our initial short position. Since we now own 1 BTC & are short 1 BTC-PERP, the price change of BTC will have no impact on our capital. In the span of these 24 hours, we will get paid a total of 309.09$ while having no exposure to BTC at all."
-kasper vandeloock
If you want to see the entire article, look it up. Also, TWAPing is basically DCAing with a large sum of money. Delta neutral trading is a great strat when the funding is in your favor and you do not want to take a directional position because you are uncertain. Remember investing and trading is all about profiting while minimizing risk. Cheers!