Are you wondering where to buy bitcoin futures? Well, bitcoin futures are now available to trade on the CFE, the futures exchange owned by the Cboe, the largest options exchange in America. The Chicago Board Options Exchange trades over 1.27 billion contracts annually (so they know what they’re doing with derivatives), and they recently introduced futures contracts for bitcoin, to facilitate speculation and hedging in the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.
So where do you buy bitcoin futures? Surprisingly, you cannot trade bitcoin futures with the CFE or Cboe alone. Like all other futures products, you have to go through an online broker that offers futures trading, namely bitcoin futures trading. These are the three main brokers that offer clients access.
Where to Buy Bitcoin Futures
Tastyworks (no special margin requirements for BTC futures)
Ally Invest (MB Trading)
Key Points
- Use tastyworks to buy bitcoin futures – tastyworks is currently the cheapest and best choice
- MB Trading also has very low futures contract pricing, great customer service, & superior trading tools
- TD Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers are way too expensive for futures trading
Both Ally Invest (MB Trading) and tastyworks are allowing their clients to trade XBT bitcoin futures right now for reasonable margin requirements. However, TD Ameritrade’s and Interactive Brokers’s initial margin requirements are quite steep. Margin requirements aside, TD’s $2.25/contract pricing and IB’s $5.00 per contract for BTC futures is just way to expensive. So TD Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers are out of the question for now.
This leaves us with tastyworks and Ally Invest.
Best Bitcoin Futures Broker
We love both tastyworks and Ally Invest, but we’re afraid there can only be one winner, and the winner is actually tastyworks.
Futures trading at tastyworks costs only $1.25 per contract and works on a tiered pricing structure to go as low as $0.25 per contract for active traders.
Plus, as if $1.25 per bitcoin futures contract weren’t good enough, tastyworks has been known to offer even lower futures pricing for active traders.
What to Know about Buying Bitcoin Futures
Because bitcoin futures are a new product, liquidity is still growing everyday. As more open-interest builds in the contracts, liquidity providers will be able to make deeper markets and provide narrower spreads. In the interim, there is tremendous arbitrage opportunity amid the price swings.
As a celebratory bonus, the CFE is waiving all bitcoin futures exchange fees for the month of December. If you trade bitcoin futures with TradeStation, this means you’ll only pay $1.25 for to buy one contract, which is equivalent to one bitcoin. This is WAY cheaper than Coinbase or any other unregulated crypto wallet.
Only $0.85 for transacting in a highly regulated marketplace, purchasing bitcoin, and not having to deal with unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges is unbelievable. We could not be more excited.
