Jan 23, 2018
How to trade Cryptocurrency without fees?
An ultimate guide on understanding trading BTC, ETH, LTC with USD, EUR and GBP with zero fees on Coinbase Pro.
This article is the second part of Beginners guide to Coinbase Pro tutorial. If you’ve not read or unfamiliar with Coinbase Pro — I would recommend to read first part which is linked below.
Edit: Coinbase Pro has now introduced little fees. However, it’s relatively less compared to other exchanges with similar features.
In this article, we’ll learn following so that we can avoid trading fees and losses.
- Understand what’s Maker and Taker in trading jargon.
- Mastering Limit buys and Sells.
- How to avoid fees by placing Limit orders and being a Maker?
Understand what’s Maker and Taker in trading jargon.
Coinbase Pro or any other exchange will charge a transaction fee whenever you make a trade — either buy or sell. Sometimes, various exchanges will have different fees structure for maker and taker orders
Maker Order If you give an offer and someone accepts it — You are the Maker and person accepting it is Taker
Taker Order If you accept someone’s offer and buy/sell at their price or at market price, then you are the Taker and person who traded with you is Maker
When you are a maker — your order is considered a Maker order
When you are a taker — your order is considered a Taker order
Mastering Limit buys and Sells.
Now that we know what’s a Maker and Taker orders are and that different exchanges will have different fee structures for them.
Coinbase Pro is a kind exchange where fees for all Maker orders is absolutely ZERO (as of January 22nd 2018).
So if we can place Maker orders properly while buying and selling — then there won’t be any transaction fees! Hurray!
Here’s how to place a Limit Buy and Limit Sell, so that you will always be making an offer and your order will be charged 0 transaction fees.
Limit Buy is placing an order with conditions. Here you can specify the quantity and at what price point, it should execute.
Say, current ETH price is $1100
Buy 2 ETH when ETH vs USD price comes down to $1000
In this case, you are making an offer and it gets executed only when someone takes it.
Limit Sell is an order where you specify the quantity and price at which your order gets executed.
Order is the condition you put along with the quantity
Execution means, the order being fulfilled
Eg: Say current price is 800 and you want to sell for profit when it reaches $1000. Then Sell 2ETH when it reaches $1000 a ETH is a limit sell order.
That’s how you avoid fees by placing smart Limit buy and sell orders and being a Maker.
This is not just for GDAX — Can be applied to other exchanges like Binance, KuCoin and more whosoever supports Limit, Market & Stoploss orders.
In our next article — we’ll learn more about avoiding losses by using an important feature provided on most of exchanges.
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While you learn to buy cryptocurrency, you also need to be responsible and pay taxes on cryptocurrency trading. Here’s an article which tries to reduce confusion and provide clarifications on taxes on gains from crypto trading.
