Our Quick 5-Pointers Analysis on the Impact of BTC Futures

Summary: Futures and spot markets integration likely to be limited due to restrictions on flow of funds and arbitrage.

1. The Introduction of BTC futures is likely to attract investments from institutions and high networth individuals.
2. With 2 markets, futures and spot, price discovery of BTC could take place on either. Price discovery process might not work as well due to arbitrage limitations.
   • Institutional monies might not flow into spot markets as institutions might be unable to deal with cryptocurrency exchanges (who operate the spot markets) for compliance/ regulatory reasons. Perhaps this is why the futures offered by CME and CBOE are USD cash-settled.
   • Retail investors have no access to the CBOE and CME futures due to high minimum contract and margin amounts.
3. Both markets are thus likely to function quite independently. However behavioural finance forces could drive prices in the spot market- e.g. new retail investors could be attracted to come onboard, existing retail retail investors could be affected by anchor biases.
4. Concerns on volatility are partially mitigated by limits on intra-day price movements set in the futures contracts.
5. Dynamics in the spot market should in principle not change much as the demographics of BTC holders are likely to remain status quo.

Understand your investing personality: https://steemit.com/blog/@valuatex/investor-personalities
Understand futures: https://valuatex.com/resources/equity/#futures (site may take a while to load sometimes)
Summary of the CBOE and CME futures: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-futures-contracts/cboe-cme-to-launch-bitcoin-futures-contracts-idUSKBN1E10KC